The relationship between the Post Office and its main IT supplier has been strained to the limit in recent years, according to evidence from senior Post office IT executive to statutory public inquiry.
Phase seven of the Post Office Horizon scandal statutory public inquiry, which is looking at current practices at the Post Office and recommendations for the future, is an opportunity to examine the problems the organisation is experiencing replacing software from Fujitsu, which is at the centre of a scandal that includes the widest miscarriage of justice in UK history.
Chris Brocklesby, chief transformation officer at the Post Office until earlier this month, gave evidence in the latest inquiry hearing. He is a seasoned IT professional with previous CIO roles at Tesco Bank, Easy Jet, Vodafone UK and Dunelm. His evidence revealed an organisation at war with its main supplier.
He joined the Post Office in August 2023. By this time, the relationship between Post Office and Fujitsu was already strained after years of Horizon scandal revelations, but months later when the Post Office scandal entered the wider public conscience, following ITVs dramatisation of it, the relationship reached breaking point.
Bad blood brothers
After years of the Post Office Horizon contract being a cash cow for Fujitsu, the supplier wanted to distance itself from the Post Office. The organisations have had a tense relationship for many years, but have resisted potentially damaging disputes amid challenges over Horizon.
During the latest inquiry hearing, a letter from Fujitsu to Simon Oldnall, Horizon IT director at the Post Office, sent earlier this year revealed that Fujitsu was questioning the Post Office’s commitment to moving on from its contract with the supplier.
Fujitsu wrote: “We have seen limited formal engagement from the Post Office to meaningfully progress the planning of exit and the exit date. Post Office is instead seeking to secure an extension and for exit to occur before the end of the ended contract term.”
Brocklesby said that a lot had been done, but there was a long way to go before the goal of retiring Horizon was reached.
He added that when he arrived at the Post Office in August 2023, there was no realistic plan in place for the delivery of a Horizon replacement. “On my arrival, the plan of record was that NBIT [New Branch IT] would be delivered, fully deployed by March 2025,” he said.
“But clearly based on what I could see when I arrived, there was little to no software that had been delivered. The software that had been built required a lot of work in terms of defects, an awful lot of work in terms of things like security.”
Brocklesby said it would take two and a half years to deploy the software, so to meet the plan the software should have been ready when he arrived, “but clearly, it was not even close to being ready”.
Playing games
He said Fujitsu knew this but was still demanding that the Post Office appoint someone to manage its exit from the Fujitsu Horizon contract, originally planned for March 2025.
“Fujitsu were aware, and had been for some time, that we needed an extension. There was no option but to extend Fujitsu services as NBIT wasn’t ready,” said Brocklesby. “It was seen as slight game playing by Fujitsu to ask for an exit manager when they were very clear that there wouldn’t be an exit in March 2025.”
In an inquiry hearing earlier this week, recently departed Post Office CFO Alisdair Cameron also revealed that the Post Office is stuck with Fujitsu until a time when it has a replacement of Horizon ready to go.
He said: “Although it was discussed over the years, it was very hard to conceive that anyone other than Fujitsu could manage Horizon, so you would only end the relationship with Fujitsu when you were really confident that [a new system] was going to go in on a certain date and was expected to work. That was never visible when I stopped working at the Post Office.”
Project Willow
Brocklesby was also asked about what was known as Project Willow, which was set up to address concerns relating to the NBIT teams that were brought to the attention of the Post Office board.
These concerns included that “information provided to executives and the CEO [about NBIT] was presented in a skewed manner [by IT] to prompt certain outcomes and so past decision-making was flawed”.
Brocklesby said that this was an accurate description of the concern, which he believes was brought to the Post Office board’s attention by a whistleblower.
During his appearance at the public inquiry last week, former Post Office chair Henry Staunton was asked if there was something intentional about the lack of information [about NBIT] provided to the board.
Staunton said: “That would be what was happening within the IT department – I think there probably was an intention for the picture not to emerge. I have no evidence of that, but it’s my gut feel. You can’t have a project go from over £300m to over £800m without some intention to hold back that information.”
NBIT timeline
The NBIT project, which was set to replace Horizon in 2025, was announced in May 2022, but, as revealed by Computer Weekly in May this year, the project hit major problems and the Post Office has requested £1bn of extra public funding from HM Treasury to get it back on track. Costs have continued to spiral, as Computer Weekly revealed earlier this week.
Brocklesby outlined how the troubled Horizon replacement project NBIT will pan out if all goes to plan between now and June 2026.
“It’s being built incrementally, starting with a certain number of the transactions that postmasters use and, building on that, more and more transactions,” he told the public inquiry. “In parallel with that, the system will be piloted in up to 50 branches, so that we get subpostmaster feedback and experience of the new system.”
He said that if this all works well, “the system will be starting to be deployed into branches” from June 2026. This will mean the Post Office can start to turn off Horizon in that branches and move them to fully relying on NBIT to serve its customers.
“[The] process of training postmasters in the new system, cutting over from the old to the new, will take the period of time between the middle of 2026 and the end of 2028.”
He said that through this period, the Post Office will start to turn off some services provided by Fujitsu, then at the end of 2028 it will turn off the last of those services and cease to rely on Fujitsu to support Horizon.
The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon accounting software, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).
• Also read: What you need to know about the Horizon scandal •
• Also watch: ITV’s documentary – Mr Bates vs The Post Office: The real story •
• Also read: Post Office and Fujitsu malevolence and incompetence means huge taxpayers’ bill •