Controversial Fujitsu contract with Post Office extended after technical challenges moving to cloud
The Post Office pays £16.5m to lengthen a contract with Fujitsu after basic technical challenges meant its deliberate migration to the cloud couldn’t be accomplished in time.
In 2021, the Post Office extended its IT companies contract with Fujitsu whereas it ready to migrate IT from the provider to one other, as but unspecified, provider or convey it in-house.
While this extension took the contract, which started in 1999, to March 2024, the datacentre operations and central community companies a part of the contract was anticipated to expire on the finish of final month – a yr earlier.
But technical challenges in moving to a cloud service supplier have pressured the Post Office to delay till the tip of March 2024.
The contract award discover stated: “The programme to transfer the services to a new cloud provider created fundamental technical challenges that [the Post Office] could not economically and technically overcome, and the business has taken the decision to pivot back to the Fujitsu provided Horizon datacentres until the successful transfer of services out of Horizon and into its replacement New Branch IT (NBIT).”
A Post Office spokesperson added: “We are continuing to make improvements to Horizon and our current systems, as well as ensuring safeguards and stability for the significant planned changes ahead. We have therefore made contract changes with Fujitsu which will apply to 31st March 2024.”
The Horizon contract – and the retail and accounting system at its core – led to a whole bunch of subpostmasters being prosecuted for monetary crimes, corresponding to theft and false accounting, primarily based on proof from the IT system. In what has been referred to as one of many greatest miscarriages of justice in UK historical past, greater than 700 subpostmasters had been prosecuted for crimes together with theft and false accounting, primarily based on proof from the flawed Horizon system.
Some subpostmasters had been despatched to jail and plenty of had been made bankrupt after being blamed for unexplained losses. A High Court case in 2019 proved that the Horizon system contained errors that would have induced unexplained losses.
A complete of 86 convicted former subpostmasters have had their convictions overturned to date, with extra anticipated.
In 2009, Computer Weekly advised the tales of seven subpostmasters affected by the losses, which led to many extra who had suffered losses coming ahead (see timeline below for Computer Weekly coverage since 2009).
The controversy is about to value UK taxpayers greater than £1bn after the federal government agreed to bail the Post Office out and pay compensation to victims of the scandal. No senior officers on the Post Office have been held to account.
Fujitsu has to date prevented any sanctions for its half in overlaying up IT issues that induced phantom losses that subpostmasters had been blamed and revealed for.
On the opposite, the Japanese IT big has continued to be awarded profitable contracts by the UK authorities.
Last yr, Fujitsu was awarded IT companies contracts by the Home Office, HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC) and the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO). It will be paid £250m by HMRC to substitute an in-house service, whereas the FCDO has contracted it to present networking and communications companies in a deal worth £184m, and the Home Office is paying Fujitsu £48m to assist the expertise underpinning the Police National Database.
