The inquiry into the Post Office Horizon IT scandal is entering its final phase, but the government must act to ensure that such injustices against postal workers don’t happen again. To avoid relying on faulty products, like Fujitsu’s Horizon system, we need to take another look at our procurement rules.
The Post Office Horizon IT inquiry has found that more than 900 subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted of theft and false accounting, and 700 of those convicted were prosecuted by the Post Office. Some subpostmasters went to prison – and one of those was a pregnant woman. The Post Office continually hounded other subpostmasters for money they never took. Many eventually handed over life savings and borrowed from family members to give the Post Office money they had been accused of stealing, according to faulty figures from the Horizon accounting system. Two subpostmasters even attempted suicide.
Bugs and errors produced by Fujitsu’s Horizon system means it has not worked properly since its first implementation by the Post Office in 1999. The system was notoriously slow and so difficult to work with that some employees used to make a ritual of doing mundane tasks before they could even log into the system. If government officials had enacted their new Procurement Act of 2023 earlier, multiple government departments and agencies could have avoided a defective computer system, while saving lots of time and money. In the Post Office example, this would have also saved many lives from being destroyed.
Previous incarnations of procurement policy in the UK have allowed big companies to win big contracts easily. In 1999, Fujitsu bought the Horizon system, already riddled with errors, in order to save face, making it seem like £700 million taxpayer money didn’t go to waste. Fujitsu has continued to win government contracts despite multiple failures. For example, in 2008, it experienced an IT disaster with the NHS, only to land a deal with the Cabinet Office in 2010. After the Cabinet Office dropped the system, another government department implemented it. Procurement laws prohibited departments from asking each other about the performance of the system. The Public Contracts Regulations (PCR) 2015 system provided some guidelines for disregarding some contractors for poor performance, but the scope of the definition was poorly defined.
Furthermore, there was no obligation to deny a contract based on poor performance, rather only if damages were done. Bidders also had to provide examples of good work, which made it easy for companies like Fujitsu to highlight projects that went well while casting a shadow on the many projects that went poorly.
The government has introduced new legislation reforming procurement that will activate in February 2025. The new Procurement Act 2023 expands the definition of poor performance and lowers the barriers needed to exclude a bidder. The new bill takes into account whether the bidder has taken any steps to make any relevant changes to prevent past problems from repeating themselves. Finally, the act creates a debarment list to prevent possibly excludable bidders from bidding, which authorities in the past unknowingly allowed.
If Fujitsu won’t stop bidding, they should be added to the debarment list. A court recently made the finding in 2019 that the Fujitsu system was not robust. Regardless, Fujitsu has been rewarded with work worth billions of pounds, approximately £4.4 billion for over 25 years, and it recently renewed its contract with the Post Office. All the while subpostmasters have been hounded, imprisoned, pushed to suicide and failed to receive the financial redress and compensation they rightly deserve.
The Procurement Act 2023 is a great step forward, making the process more competitive, transparent and open. It has attempted to address and return to these key principles of public procurement. If it had come 20 years earlier, this entire scandal could have potentially been avoided.
The recent reform seems good on paper, allowing departments to discuss contractor performance and expanding the ability to discriminate based on said performance. We will have to wait a few years to see its true impact.
Oscar Gill-Lewis is a political commentator with Young Voices UK and an editor for Speak Freely Magazine.
