The Post Office has formally signed a contract with the supplier set to replace the controversial Horizon system, following a three-month delay induced by a challenge from the losing bidder.
The £169.2m deal for an electronic point of sale system (EPOS) is Lot 2 of the plan to remove Fujitsu and its system, which is at the heart of the Post Office scandal. The contract was initially set to be formally signed on 3 June, but has been extended on six occasions.
As Computer Weekly revealed earlier this month, the delay was due to a challenge from losing supplier Escher, which believed it should have been awarded the contract. Alongside the OneView Commerce contract announcement, the Post Office said Escher has been awarded a separate deal.
A source told Computer Weekly that Escher – the supplier that made the final two bids but lost out on the contract – made a claim for loss of profits for a contract it believes it should have won.
Neither the Post Office nor Escher would confirm or deny the claims, and the Department for Business and Trade, which owns the Post Office, also declined to comment.
A source told Computer Weekly that Escher and the Post Office have been negotiating behind the scenes, with claims that the Post Office incorrectly scored Escher’s original bid for the replacement contract won by OneView Commerce.
The other contract in the Horizon replacement plan, Lot 1, is a £322.8m contract to run Horizon. It was won by Accenture and formally signed off months ago.
Separate deal
The Post Office has now announced that the contract has been signed off, including a “separate agreement” with Escher to provide “a component of the Horizon replacement programme”.
Post Office CEO Neil Brocklehurst said: “Replacing the Horizon system is one of the most significant changes we are making as part of the Post Office’s transformation. This is about more than introducing new technology; it is about creating modern, flexible systems that are designed around the needs of customers and the postmasters who serve them.
“Having these partners in place will now enable us to accelerate the introduction of a new platform that is simpler to operate behind Post Office counters, therefore improving operational efficiency throughout our branch network.”
Escher has a historic link to Horizon. As part of the controversial Horizon system, the Post Office used middleware from Escher, known as Riposte, and the Fujitsu-designed software was written onto it.
There is no suggestion the Escher software was at fault. A source, who worked in the development of the original Horizon EPOS system in the 1990s, told Computer Weekly in 2021 that the big flaw in Horizon was the way data was being written to Riposte.
Unwanted legacy
In July 2025, Computer Weekly learned that two former Post Office executives, who served for decades at the Post Office, including in senior roles, were in the Escher team bidding for the Horizon replacement contract. Although Escher was not at fault, many see the company as being an unpalatable choice, particularly with former Post Office staff working in the bidding team.
The move to an off-the-shelf EPOS system was supposed to reduce complexity. The Post Office announced its plan to buy an off-the-shelf replacement, which had been on the cards since October last year, when, during his appearance at the Post Office scandal public inquiry, Post Office chairman Nigel Railton said the company’s decision to build the new system in-house was one of two reasons the project was “set up to fail”.
Railton told the inquiry: “One was the decision ‘to get off Horizon’, which is different to building a system for the future, and the second was the decision to build in-house.”
He said there were many “horror stories” of people trying to build systems in-house. “I think, based on my experience, that this was always set up to fail,” he told the public inquiry.
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).
