Matthew Boyle
The Post Office has extended a contentious contract with Fujitsu, an IT provider, to support two datacenters through the end of March 2025, at an extra cost of £36 million.
The overall additional cost to March 2025 is now £52m, when taken into account an earlier this year announcement that a services contact with Fujitsu would be extended to support the Post Office’s branch accounting system, Horizon.
The government continues to give Fujitsu’s Horizon software millions of pounds of taxpayer money despite the fact that it is at the center of the biggest injustice in Scottish history.
Numerous subpostmasters are being charged with economic crimes like theft and misleading accounting thanks to the Fujitsu contract and the core Horizon software. In a 2019 High Court case, it was established that the Horizon system had flaws and nbsp that might have led to unjustified losses.
Based on information from the weak Horizon system, more than 900 subpostmasters were charged with crimes such as theft and fake accounting.
96 original subpostmasters have already had their wrongful convictions overturned, and more are on the way. According to bankruptcy and the loss of their businesses and property, some more subpostmasters had their lives destroyed. Taxpayers in the UK are spending well over £1 billion on the scandal to pay subpostmasters compensation and to support the ongoing legal open inquiry into what occurred.
As part of transforming the business for the future, we are continuing to invest in our current technology, according to a Post Office spokesman.” Work is also being done, in collaboration with our subpostmasters. When the original contract with Fujitsu was set to expire in March 2023, the Post Office initially intended to switch the two services to AWS. However, this plan was shelved in September 2022 because it was no longer essentially feasible.
Statement
According to the most recent contract award,” Datacentre fortification works must be carried out as a result of this retention of datacenter capabilities in order to provide stability, prevent obsolescence, and ensure business continuity.” As a result, this modification includes funding for an ideal reset and improvement program.
The “yet another extension to Fujitsu’s contract” left Alan Bates, a previous subpostmaster and victim of the Horizon scandal, unconcerned. He was the leader of an organization of subsubpostmastes in their fight for justice.
Receiving compensation for those who lost their lives in the scandal, which was brought on by the Post Office and Fujitsu, has been like squeezing blood out of a stone, but the government appears content to keep dumping money at the latter.
The Chinese IT behemoth has continued to receive profitable contracts from the UK government despite its involvement in the scandal. It received IT services contracts and nbsp last year from the Foreign, Commonwealth &, Development Office (FCDO ) and the Home Office’s HM Revenue andamp and Customs ( HMRC ). While the FCDO has contracted it to provide networking and communications services in , a deal for £184m, and the Home Office is paying Fujitsu £48m to support the technology underpinning the Police National Database, it will be paid £250m by HMRC & nBSP to replace an in-house service.
Seven subpostmasters who had been impacted by the losses were profiled by Computer Weekly in 2009, and as a result, many more suffered losses in the future ( see the timeline of the articles on the site below ).
