The Post Office has extended its controversial contract with Fujitsu as it awaits decisions and approvals on the next step in the project to replace the Horizon software used in Post Office branches.
According to the Post Office, no decision has been made yet on the in-house New Branch IT (NBIT) project, despite reports to the contrary.
The Post Office has also ended contracts of some third party suppliers and contractors as it reviews its position.
In October, Computer Weekly revealed that the NBIT inhouse software project was set to be axed, but the Post Office’s IT boss said a decision would be made in the new year.
At the time, a source close to the project said “the writing is on the wall” for the in-house project, with the Post Office expected to buy a system “off the shelf”.
During a Post Office Horizon scandal public inquiry hearing earlier this year, recently installed 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 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, adding: “I think, based on my experience, that this was always set up to fail.”
In May, Computer Weekly revealed the NBIT project to replace Horizon with in-house software was running late and hugely over budget. Costs had increased by £1bn and a government report described the project as “unachievable”.
In an interview with Computer Weekly last month, the Post Office’s new IT boss, Andy Nice, said the Post Office was not taking the decision over the future of NBIT lightly.
Nice said a decision would be made before the new financial year begins in April 2025. “We got permission from the government and the board to pause NBIT at the beginning of October, so have only been looking at this in anger for a few weeks,” he said, agreeing that a decision “can’t drag on”.
When the Post Office put out a tender for an off-the-shelf electronic point of sale (EPOS) system to replace Horizon, supplier Escher came out as preferred bidder, before the previous Post Office IT leadership opted to build in-house.
During the public inquiry earlier this year, it emerged that the Post Office was investigating allegations that staff working on the NBIT project, including Nice’s predecessor Chris Brocklesby, misrepresented alternatives to building Horizon’s in-house replacement.
An internal Post Office ad hoc board report, made public by the inquiry, revealed more details of the investigation known as Willow2, which is looking into claims that tech teams working on the NBIT system misled the senior executives with information “presented in a skewed manner to prompt certain outcomes”.
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 the accounting software (see timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal below).