Campaign4Change

By Tony Collins

“To my shame I didn’t know very much about this,” said actor Toby Jones. He was speaking at a press screening at BAFTA of “Mr Bates v The Post Office“, a star-studded ITV drama series on the Post Office IT scandal.

The series has prime-time TV slots: the first 60-minute episode will air on New Year’s Day at 9pm on ITV and ITVX, followed by three further episodes on consecutive evenings at 9pm.

Some scenes in the episodes may lodge in the national psyche, in a way that news stories on the scandal rarely have, however influential they were at the time.

Also being aired in the first week of January is an ITV documentary on the scandal Mr Bates vs the Post Office: The Real Story. It will go out on the same evening as the final episode, 4 January, at 10.45pm.

The series has a a focus on how a respected state-owned institution, the Post Office, intervened in the normal family life of branch sub-postmasters, sub-mistresses and their staff, in ways that had lasting effects on young children, grandparents, wives, husbands and partners.

People watching may need to remind themselves that the story is based on fact not fiction.

“You can’t believe it’s true,” said cast member Will Mellor who plays former sub-postmaster Lee Castleton. “Even when we were filming it, I just kept saying ‘I can’t believe they’ve actually done this to these people.’”

At one level it’s a mystery story. Why did the Post Office’s corporate executives and others at a senior level, including auditors, investigators and lawyers, seem to try and outdo each other in demonstrating inhumanity towards sub-postmasters and their families?

The context

Toby Jones plays Alan Bates, the former sub-postmaster who, with help from forensic accountant Kay Linnell and solicitor James Hartley, raised the tens of millions of pounds needed to sue the Post Office and expose the widest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

The Bates-led litigation proved that Fujitsu’s Horizon system, as rolled out to thousands of local Post Office branches, was faulty and the cause of mysterious shortfalls in sub-postmaster accounts.

The system not only had bugs, defects and errors but Fujitsu staff working at a central location had “remote access” to Horizon systems as used by sub-postmasters in their local branches.

This remote access meant Fujitsu staff could alter financial balances of branch accounts systems – without the knowledge of sub-postmasters.

The Post Office did not want anyone outside the corporate Post Office to know about remote access or Horizon’s bugs, errors and defects.

It was easy to keep these things hidden because of a culture of impunity: the Post Office remains a commmercial enterprise that cannot go bust or be held properly to account because it is 100%-owned by government.

Within this no-consequence culture, the Post Office was able to maintain a pretence that Horizon was robust.

Had the pretence been left at that, a mere pretence, nobody would have much noticed or cared. But the Post Office took the pretence many stages further: it prosecuted more than 700 postal workers on the back of Horizon’s unreliable data.

Former postal workers went to prison for theft when the Post Office knew they hadn’t stolen anything. The Post Office also forced some into bankruptcy and confiscated their homes. Sub-postmasters parted with personal possessions such as wedding and engagement rings to pay phantom debts. The Post Office removed sub-postmasters’ livelihoods rather than own up to Horizon’s faults. Postal workers were pressured to confess they had stolen money when they knew they had stolen nothing: they hoped their made-up confessions would keep them out of jail – but some still went to jail anyway. Marriages broke up. Many sub-postmasters suffered health problems. More than 60 died without compensation. Some committed suicide.

Some also gave in to Post Office pressure, in plea bargaining, not to criticise Horizon in their court cases or defence statements.

It is only since the Bates v Post Office litigation ended in 2019 that the general public has begun to learn of the scandal. Before that, some national newspapers were wary about reporting the scandal for legal reasons but Bates’ success in the litigation proved without doubt the existence of remote access and errors, bugs and defects in the system.

Since then, several national newspapers have had the legal confidence to bring the scandal to public attention. Ten years before, in 2009, Rebecca Thomson of Computer Weekly broke the story of the scandal and the magazine’s Karl Flinders has maintained the magazine’s reputation for revelatory pieces. Journalist Nick Wallis has also kept the scandal in the public eye with his blog, TV and radio documentaries and his book “The Great Post Office Scandal“. Private Eye and more recently The Law Society Gazette have also given the story important coverage, as has Tom Witherow of the Daily Mail and then The Times.

The ITV series will take media coverage of the scandal further: at prime-time for much of the first week in January, millions of TV viewers will see a sharp contrast between some of those who worked for the corporate Post Office, who seemed to live in a fantasy world where Horizon could do no wrong, and the branch sub-postmasters and their families who became victims of that Post Office fantasy.

Writer Gwyneth Hughes has not shied away from the technology. Remote access is shown in a scene involving former sub-postmaster Michael Rudkin, played by Shaun Dooley.

In his official capacity as a negotiator on behalf of sub-postmasters, Rudkin visited Fujitsu’s offices in Bracknell to discuss problems with the Horizon system. When he recognised Horizon terminals in a computer room he visited and asked an operator if he was working on live Horizon data, the operator said he could alter a bureau de change figure to show that the data was live. The operator then laughed and said, ‘I’ll have to put it back. Otherwise, the sub-postmaster’s account will be short tonight.”

Rudkin expressed concern, because he had been told that remote access wasn’t possible. At that point, Rudkin was politely but speedily taken to Fujitsu’s reception, and he was told to leave the building.

The next day, the Post Office claimed that Rudkin’s branch had a £44,000 loss. Rudkin’s wife Susan was subsequently charged with false accounting and given a wrongful criminal conviction. The Post Office meanwhile applied for a confiscation order on all his property and he had his bank account frozen under the Proceeds of Crime Act 2002. He also lost his job.

The destruction of the Rudkins’ lives features in the ITV drama. What may linger in the mind, however, was the Post Office’s denial that Rudkin had visited Fujitsu. Rudkin was able to prove otherwise, which leaves the viewer to wonder whether the Post Office cares much about the truth – or indeed whether it has any need to care about the truth.

Susan Rudkin’s conviction was overturned in 2020. The couple recently described the Post Office’s compensation offer as “obscene”.

Why the reach of ITV Post Office drama series is important

Speaking between screenings of the drama’s various episodes, Toby Jones said he had understood little of the scandal before he came to be involved in the drama.

He said,

“Frequently it is quite hard to understand beyond the headline … there’s something by definition about sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses that is unshowy, unflashy citizenry and when that comes onto the news there is a part of your brain that switches off … to my shame I didn’t know enough about it.”

Jones was abroad when he first called Alan Bates. “I said that I am the guy who is going to play you”, to which Bates jokingly replied, “Well you’re going to have a bit of a problem because I don’t have any emotion.”

Jones said,

“That did strike me as a bit of a problem … He claimed to have no emotional life … It becomes clear the toll it [the scandal] has taken on Alan and it is a great great tribute to his character, his doggedness, his determination and his sheer intelligence that the next person I rang was James [now Lord] Arbuthbnot, and asked whether it was a pain in the neck, ever, that Alan was phoning you to hassle you over this thing that was emerging …he said every time Alan Bates comes into my life it’s a privilege to be with someone who is fundamentally a good man.”

Jones added, almost smiling, “It’s hard to play a good man the kind of man I am.”

Several of the cast said they knew little of the scandal beforehand. That the parts they play may linger in the mind is a tribute to the skills of the actors and Gwyneth Hughes’ beautifully-crafted but hard-hitting script.

Hughes met and became a friend of some of the former sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses as part of her research. The series focuses on Alan Bates and his partner Suzanne Sercombe (played by ex-Coronation Street actress Julie Hesmondhalgh). Former sub-postmistress Jo Hamilton (played by Monica Dolan) also has an important role in the series, as do Lee Castleton, James Arbuthnot (played by Alex Jennings) Noel Thomas (played by Ifan Huw Dafydd) and Pam Stubbs (Lesley Nicol).

Computer Weekly, whose reporter Rebecca Thomson investigated and wrote the first story on the scandal, also has a role in the drama.

Distressing

Hughes’ lightness of touch leavens otherwise distressing family stories. Below are some of the punchier lines of actors who play former postal workers. They are taken from some of the drama’s early episodes …

– “I wonder if they [the Post Office] know they’re talking bollocks.”

– “We’ll just trust in the British justice system and we’ll be alright.” [This is an innocent former sub-postmaster’s comment to his family in advance of his court hearings that have a grim conclusion]

– “They’re a bunch of lying bastards.” [A reference to the Post Office.]

“They have blood on their hands now.” [Alan Bates’ comment on learning that an innocent former sub-postmaster Martin Griffiths has stepped into the path of an oncoming bus. The drama shows Griffiths’ family life before his suicide.]

Tears

During a break in the screenings, several people in the audience spoke of wiping away tears. The audience comprised journalists, actors (including Jones) and some of the sub-postmasters whose lives were depicted in the series. One audience member who knew almost nothing of the scandal before the screening said she was enraged at the lack of accountability.

Cast members also commented on the lack of accountability. One said,

“The whole thing really is about accountability and power. Where is the accountability?”

Other cast members spoke of the scandal in the present tense. None saw it as resolved or purely in the past. One member of the production team spoke of …

“this hideous, ongoing miscarriage of justice.”

[Indeed, Wallis wrote last month of a sub-postmistress Teju Adedayo whose conviction has been overturned but the Post Office is refusing to pay her compensation.]

Mystery?

The Post Office’s motivations in protecting its brand above any humanitarian considerations mystified several of the cast. These are some comments of cast members,

– “People are going out of their way to make it impossible to resolve this”

– “They [the Post Office] are spinning it out [a reference to delays in paying compensation to victims]. I don’t know why. It is madness. What is motivating this blockage?”

– “It is very curious and it remains curious however much you read about it … I talk to Alan [Bates] about it. Why are they doing this? What makes people feel more loyalty to a brand than they do to victims who are dying? It is mysterious…. It is absolutely extraordinary that someone will lie in court to protect a brand. I cannot get my head around that.”  

Comment

Mr Bates v The Post Office is likely to move the hardest of hearts.

It’s unconscionable for a state-owned instiutution to ruin one life. But the ITV drama goes into the ruined lives of family after family. Victims include children. Millie-Jo Castleton was eight when her father’s endless ordeals began. She is now 26 and still the after-effects continue.

Even today it’s difficult to tell whether most current and former Post Office officials, other than the chief executive Nick Read, have any lasting concerns over the IT scandal.

This year’s Bonusgate scandal, perhaps, captures the general corporate mood. It has emerged that dozens of Post Office executives have gained financially from the existence of a public inquiry into the scandal: the executives received bonuses for engaging positively with the inquiry.

One would have thought they’d have engaged positively without any special payment.

There’s no doubt Nick Read is sincere and earnest in his apologies for the scandal but most other executives, past and present, have yet to express shame and embarrassment at the corporate concealment of Horizon’s bugs, errors, defects and and the hiding of remote access, early exposure of which could have undermined hundreds of prosecution cases.

The four-hour ITV drama series, however, may hit the corporate Post Office in its most vulnerable spot: its reputation as seen by millions of ordinary people

The Post Office uses brand surveys to check how it is perceived by the man and woman in the street and, apart from occasional wobbles during a prolonged spell of bad publicity, its reputation holds up surprisingly well. The general public, perhaps, judge the Post Office on genial local sub-postmasters. The public might not care much about corporate attitudes and shennanigans.

The ITV drama may change that: it shows that sub-postmasters and the corporate Post Office are not the same thing.

Perhaps it’s little wonder the Post Office did not engage with the ITV series. Indeed, the various episodes may do little or nothing to make it easier for the Post Office to recruit at an executive level, which it is having trouble doing already: how many talented job-hunting executives would want “Post Office Head Office” on their CV?

But the drama has its positives: it may discourage the Post Office from continued unnecessary and apparently vindictive actions against some former sub-postmasters, alive and dead.

One case in point is the Post Office’s decision to spend public money this year opposing the posthumous appeal of Joanne O’Donnell. The Post Office is also refusing to pay compensation to some of those whose convictions have been overturned.

When compensation is paid, it is unusually inadequate and sometimes insulting. Today, nearly 24 years on from the start of the scandal, some victims are on the verge of destitution and are being threatened with eviction; they face being homeless because they cannot pay their rent. Others are dying without receiving full and fair compensation.

If nothing else, one hopes the drama will instill in current and former Post Office executives, lawyers, auditors, investigators and managers a sense of shame and embarrassment.

It’s just a suggestion but Sir Wyn Williams’ inquiry ought to have a new phase of hearings where his legal team questions successive generations of Post Office board executives who knew of Horizon’s faults but kept quiet and the Whitehall officials whose staunch resistance to effective checks and balances allowed the scandal to happen.

How did the scandal happen?

If you give a state-owned institution almost complete autonomy, a culture of impunity, an ability to operate in almost total secrecy, financial incentives that reward corporate loyalty and commercial performance rather than constructive criticism or challenge, and you top it all with a criminal justice system that encourages abuses of process when it comes to complex technology-based prosecutions, and you have the seeds of the Post Office IT scandal.

Government officials let an unaccountable organisation, the Post Office, buy a defective accounting system for its 18,000 retail branches, let it pretend the technology was robust when it knew it wasn’t, let it lie when challenged by IT experts and outsiders and let it plug any suspected financial holes shown on the system by making franchisees, sub-postmasters, cover discrepancies from their own pockets. The technological pretence was made all the more real when sub-postmasters were imprisoned, bankrupted and their livelihoods removed.

Officials also let it pay bonuses based on the organisation’s performance and, in some cases, bonuses for financial recoveries in the wake of successful prosecutions.

It would all have carried on like this had Alan Bates and his legal team not sued the Post Office. The High Court was the one thing the Post Office could not control – though it tried, by seeking the judge’s removal.

Thanks to Alan Bates there is now have the promise of justice for hundreds of former postal workers; and thanks to the ITV drama, millions of people will understand how brutal state officials and their lawyers can be when they cannot be held to account.

Also thanks to the drama, the general public will follow the lives of ordinary, and yet extraordinary, sub-postmasters, sub-mistresses and postal workers who worked hard to serve their local communities until the Post Office removed their livelihoods.

That the sub-postmasters had the misfortune to work for a state institution that treated them as thieving crooks says a great deal about the twin dysfunctions of a Whitehall machine that has no effective checks and balances and a criminal justice system that almost welcomes injustices in complex technology cases.

Meanwhile, what are we left with?

Perhaps a Post Office that is destined to spend the rest of his existence in the public sector making enemies, all watched on by an extraordinarly complacent government and criminal justice system.

That said, the scandal could provide an opportunity for real and genuine (not cosmetic) change in the government and criminal justice system. If this opportunity is lost, the scandal’s lesson-learning exercises will amount to nothing.

Mr Bates v The Post Office – YouTube trailer

Sir Humphrey, permanent secretary at the fictional Department for Administrative Affairs, and his minister Jim Hacker, discuss (below) the Post Office IT scandal.

By Tony Collins

Hacker: Ah Humphrey. Please pull up a chair.

Humphrey: (stands at Hacker’s desk) Thank you minister.

Hacker: I want to ask you about this Post Office IT scandal. I’ve heard –

Humphrey: Not our department minister.

Hacker: I know but it affects all of us. The Post Office is 100% owned by government and government has behaved abominably. I’ve heard a great deal about it from constituents and their experts. Are there any similarities with the latest Covid scandal?

Humphrey: What Covid scandal?

Hacker: Don’t you read the newspapers? We did our best to stop Downing Street’s Google apps and Whatsapp messages reaching the Covid inquiry.

Humphrey: No similarities minister. The Post Office erroneously prosecuted about 700 postmasters or their staff on the basis of information from a faulty computer system. That has nothing to do with the Covid-19 pandemic inquiry.

Hacker: Cover-ups Humphrey. They are both about cover-ups.  The Post Office IT scandal is about a cover-up of faults with the so-called Horizon system supplied by a Japanese company called Fujitsu. In the Covid inquiry we’ve paid vast sums to lawyers to decide what information is relevant to release and what not to release. That’s another cover-up. Does the state have a problem with truth Humphrey?

Humphrey: No problem with truth as long as it doesn’t get into the public domain.

Hacker: I’m in no mood Humphrey. I was being serious.

Humphrey: (gravely) I was entirely serious minister. Truth in democratic institutions is a difficult concept. We’ve been through this before. Governments would last a very short time if truth were allowed freely into the public domain. You don’t want opposition MPs to seize on carelessly-released facts to dance over your metaphorical grave. It’s my responsibility and that of my colleagues to protect you and other ministers from damaging criticism or embarrassment. 

Hacker: That’s ridiculous Humphrey. The papers are full of criticism every day. I am being criticised or embarrassed practically all the time.  

Humphrey: Nobody minds criticism. As long as it’s not informed by the actual truth.

Hacker: Thank goodness then for Parliamentary debates, Parliamentary questions, select committee reports, the National Audit Office and public inquiries. You and your colleagues don’t monopolise truth as much as you would like.

Humphrey: Actually we control the truth in all those cases. We release as much of it as we consider it is in the public interest to disclose.

Hacker: Thank goodness for leaks then.

Humphrey: We control those as well.

Hacker: (pensive) Of course. Downing Street leaks like a sieve. It’s the one ship that leaks from the top.

Humphrey: Quite. And how many ministerial lunches have you had this month with newspaper editors?

Hacker: You are horribly right Humphrey. I am beginning to understand the Post Office IT scandal… the truth about the Horizon computer system was missing because nobody wanted to find it.

Humphrey: To an extent yes. But the Post Office went over the top.

Hacker: Go on.

Humphrey: Well innocent people are not normally imprisoned when something goes wrong with a government computer system.

Hacker: Why with the Post Office then?

Humphrey: As I say, it is perfectly normal for government institutions to protect information about faults in their computer systems. It would not have been in the public interest for Mr and Mrs Jones to go into their local post office for foreign currency or everyday banking and see headlines about the Post Office’s computer systems being infested with bugs. If people stopped going to the post office, swathes of branches would close.  

Hacker: And bonuses for directors would have been affected?

Humphrey: I am sure that is not the reason for protecting information about Horizon.

Hacker: (Angry) What was the reason then? To shore up the Post Office’s commercial position by confiscating homes, businesses and sometimes even wedding rings of entirely innocent people who happened to be using this Horizon system when it kept running up phantom debts? Some of these poor people are my constituents. Humphrey, why were your colleagues standing by …  with condescending insouciance …  while dozens of innocent postmasters went to prison and Post Office executives collected bonuses on the back of the Post Office’s financial performance?

Humphrey: I understand that various compensation schemes are meeting requirements.

Hacker: Meeting requirements! Humphrey, we are waiting for people to die before we pay compensation.

Humphrey: It’s my understanding that fair amounts of compensation are being paid.

Hacker: When claimants are dead. Humphrey, I must demand your colleagues pay proper compensation while claimants are still alive.

Humphrey: If that’s true it’s most regrettable. I’d understood my colleagues are doing their best to ensure payments are on time and that the correct amounts are paid out of the public purse.

Hacker: Yes most regrettable Humphrey. [Picks up Sidmouth Herald)  I see we’ve done the right thing by postmaster Russell Ward-Best from the beautiful Devon town of Ottery St Mary.

Humphrey: On the River Otter. I know it well.

Hacker: He was blamed for £17,000 shown as missing on Horizon and lost his job. He went bankrupt. [Reads from the Sidmouth Herald]  …

Humphrey: “Now the Post Office has formally recognised he did nothing wrong. Its Historical Shortfall compensation scheme has paid off all his bankruptcy debts along with the interest accrued over more than 20 years, and the bankruptcy will be removed from his records. His name has been cleared.” That is a recent article Humphrey.

Humphrey: [Smugly] Yes, as I said, the system of restitution is working. Everything is being put right.

Hacker: Russell Ward-Best is dead. He died in 2016. His marriage broke up and he descended into debt and depression. He protested his innocence right up to his death. He went to the grave without a penny in compensation. He is one of dozens who’ve died in similar horrific circumstances. Now do you say the system is working? 

Humphrey: (head bowed, says nothing)

Hacker: These postmasters were trying to give to their communities. They wanted to serve. They hardly made a living in many cases. The Post Office mendaciously took their homes and businesses. Its abominable prosecutions saw many of them lose their liberty. Some despairing and destitute postmasters even committed suicide. And all your former colleagues did was stand on the sidelines yawning with boredom at what was happening. Your current colleagues are hardly any better: they’re obsessed with making sure we don’t overpay compensation.

Humphrey: [head still bowed] We must represent the taxpayer as well as the victims.

Hacker: “We need to start being counter-intuitive with compensation Humphrey: keep it simple. Stop all these different compensation schemes with their own complicated rules. We need to stop swamping each case in a mass of bureaucracy to put people off claiming.  A tiny number of victims have come forward for compensation. That’s hardly surprising.

Humphrey: I must emphasise that it’s not our department. It’s my understanding that my colleagues are trying to keep the rules for compensation payments as fair, consistent and simple as possible. 

Hacker: I don’t mean a Whitehall simplification process that ends up paying lawyers far more than the victims. I mean a genuine simplification. Let’s put claims into bands like the Council Tax bands – A to F. We do a short assessment with each claimant  – lasting an hour or two at the most – not months or years as at present – and counter-intuitively we assume claimants are telling the truth. We stop assuming they’re lying. And we stop paying our lawyers vast sums to find out if claimants are lying.      

Humphrey: The Treasury has to approve payments I’m afraid. They won’t mind underpayments but they will not allow deliberate overpayments that have not been properly assessed.

Hacker: We overpaid tens of billions for PPE and Track and Trace. The Treasury turned a blind eye to those overpayments. Why is it now obsessed with not making overpayments to postmasters? It is simply not possible to overpay these people. A government institution has ruined their lives. No amount of money will make up for it. If we continue to obsess about overpayments, we’ll let more people die without anything at all. Do we secretly hold a grudge against these postmasters for exposing a government machine that’s largely dysfunctional?  Can I tell my constituents that we’re at last starting – genuinely and immediately – to address the injustices of it all?

 Humphrey: I would be surprised if my colleagues were not already being generous at times in the amounts they paid. And we’ve recently made sure tax doesn’t swallow up much of the compensation.

Hacker: Humphrey, watching these compensation schemes is like watching a sports team with a mass of breathing equipment trying to run the 100 metres underwater. Just put claimants in an A to F band and pay them now.  Otherwise Whitehall’s critics will be right to call you and your colleagues totally heartless. The BBC says the Post Office IT scandal is far from over. It is absolutely correct.

Humphrey: I agree that we need to do more to resolve matters.  

Hacker: Humphrey, officials have been saying that for years. You’d soon pull your finger out if it was your mother, father, sister or brother in the grave. We’re all tainted by this scandal.  

Humphrey: (Recovering) I am not sure where you are going with this minister. The Post Office IT scandal is an unfortunate affair. I feel enormous sympathy for the victims but, as far as I and my colleagues are concerned, it is a one-off matter. We are not all tainted.

Hacker: We are all tainted Humphrey. Please don’t ooze complacency when cover-ups are the norm.  Look at all the families that lost a loved one to Covid. We repay them with an inquiry where we try and cover up in the so-called public interest, in good faith? Where is your sense of sense of right and wrong in all this Humphrey?

Humphrey: We could launch a search.

Hacker: You are making light of it. This couldn’t be more serious.

Humphrey: I am not making light of it minister. I suggested we launch a search because I don’t think the answer would be easy to find. My colleagues and I don’t do right and wrong. Subjective values cannot determine Civil Service protocols, conventions and codes. One person’s right is another’s wrong – and we are most definitely neutral. We could not hope to come up with answers to questions of right and wrong when thousands of years of philosophy have not produced a clear consensus. We do our work, therefore, without the slightest notion of any difference between right and wrong.

Hacker: Now I’m beginning to understand the Post Office IT scandal and how your colleagues were content to let it happen. We’ll resume this another time. You are free to leave.

Humphrey: Yes minister

BBC News – 1 December 2022

“Success is walking from failure to failure with no loss of enthusiasm” – Winston Churchill

By Tony Collins

Why the Post Office IT scandal happened and some of its largely-fixable contributory causes were covered in a Campaign4Change post yesterday. One conclusion was that the Post Office IT scandal was waiting to happen.

Today’s piece looks at some of the underlying causes of the scandal that are mostly unfixable. One problem is that parts of the government and Whitehall machine are deeply dysfunctional. It’s not the fault of any individuals. Author Diane Vaughan describes banal corporate cultures that lead to disaster as the “normalisation of deviance”.

Summary of mostly-unfixable underlying causes of the Post Office IT scandal

– It is perfectly normal in Whitehall to buy, accept and roll out defective systems. It has happened routinely since early government computerisations in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. This blog post lists some of relevant projects. In the context of government’s poor record on IT, Horizon was simply one of many flawed computer systems that were bought with public money, formally accepted by officials who would not expect to be held responsible for their decisions and rolled out to thousands of unsuspecting end-users.

– It would be a major break with convention for any publicly-funded institution, including the Post Office, to reveal publicly the faults in its core IT systems unless the faults were already public knowledge. Weaknesses in Horizon were known at the time of the system’s national roll-out. Had software specialists been free to call out those weaknesses publicly at the roll-out stage, it’s unlikely the Post Office would have been able to confiscate businesses and homes, remove livelihoods and secure hundreds of convictions based on Horizon’s robustness.

Cultish ideology

– In the absence of effective independent scrutiny or challenge, and within a Whitehall bubble that is itself not subject to effective scrutiny, a mini-authoritarian ideology took hold at the Post Office over Horizon. Little exists in Whitehall’s armoury to stop a cultish ideology over an IT system again taking hold, unacknowledged and under cover of confidentiality, almost anywhere in central government or the wider public sector.

Faulty presumption

– If other public institutions take innocent people to court based on data from a flawed IT system, judges are likely to take the prosecution’s computer evidence at face value, as they did with many victims of the Post Office IT scandal. An obsolescent Law Commission “Presumption” means that judges can regard complex IT systems much as a mechanical clock that is assumed to be working if the hands can be seen moving. But Horizon had thousands of faults, some of which were blame for intermittent balance discrepancies in branches. For the Law Commission to normalise treating such a complex system as a mechanical clock underlines how deviant and deeply dysfunctional the Whitehall machine can be. The backward-facing Ministry of Justice has refused to modernise the “presumption”. Barrister Paul Marshall has written an article headlined, “Government failings on computer evidence risk more miscarriages of justice.”

No consequences

– Whitehall has a convention of no individual consequences for failure. Sometimes there is accountability but “responsibility” is normally collective not individual. In more than 40 years of government-funded IT-based project failures, nobody was held responsible except at the BBC where the chief technology lost his job in 2013 over the failed £100m Digital Media Initiative. Post Office higher-ups had no fear of action being taken against them for collectively bad decisions. It appears that a demonstrable belief in Horizon was seen as an act of loyalty.

– Every major government IT project has a “senior responsible owner” who is ultimately accountable for a programme or project meeting its objectives, delivering the projected outcomes and realising the required benefits. In practice the SROs, as they are called, are not always told the whole truth about the projects for which they are responsible. Sometimes a project or programme has several SROs.

– The lack of effective checks and balances across central government is currently illustrated by the national roll-out today of defective IT to the courts. The “Common Platform” is a £250m IT project run by HM Courts and Tribunals Service which is part of the Ministry of Justice. It has taken a BBC “File on 4” documentary, which was broadcast last month, to show that the system has led to wrongful arrests. Indeed, File on 4 compares Common Platform to the Post Office IT scandal. The Common Platform is following the usual lifecycle of a failing major IT project.

The whole truth?

– A stage in this lifecycle is that senior officials make public statements in direct opposition to those made by the system’s end-users who, in the case of Common Platform, are judges, barristers and solicitors. It is commonplace in failing IT projects for protected interests in government to make public statements that contradict the criticisms of those who are simply using the system to do their work. This happened at the Post Office for 19 years. Sir Wyn Williams, the much-respected chairman of the Horizon IT inquiry, will have no power to change the Whitehall culture that encourages protected interests to present IT project failure as success.

– Senior officials have a difficult job to do when it comes to public communications on big projects that go wrong. One of their top priorities is to protect ministers and the government from embarrassment. Thus they will not want to say anything that could make the civil service look dysfunctional. To this end, they will keep quiet about facts that could be used by opposition MPs to make mischief. This helps to explain why successive ministers have, based on drafts written by senior officials, routinely given misleadingly positive statements on the status of IT systems such as Horizon.

– Such unjustified official optimism has dogged nearly every government-funded IT project disaster listed here.

– On the Common Platform project a government spokesperson told Mail Online that the system has “already successfully managed over 158,000 criminal cases and there is no evidence that Common Platform is compromising justice or putting parties at risk”. But the BBC said, “File on 4 has spoken with whistle-blowers from within the court service who say the system is unsafe, unfinished and beset with bugs, errors and glitches”.

– Similarly, the GOV.UK website has an unremittingly positive “overview” of the UK’s most costly non-military IT project, the Home Office’s Emergency Services Network. The overview gives no hint that the project is billions of pounds over budget, more than five years behind schedule and may never work. The £11.4bn project seems to be following the path of the £10bn National Programme for IT in the NHS, the government’s most costly IT project failure to date. The NPfIT, as it was known, was “dismantled” in 2011 after eight years of ministerial assurances about its success. Official statements on Horizon’s robustness followed a familiar general pattern of untruthfulness that concealed IT faults. This pattern is probably too ingrained within central government to be fixable.

Honesty and integrity unscrutinised

– It is enshrined into law that the civil servants who brief ministers must be honest, act with integrity, be neutral and tell the truth. But there are no punishments for breaches. Governments indeed expect that ministerial statements, at least on IT projects, will not cause any political embarrassment. Thus official briefings and draft ministerial statements are tailored accordingly: a selected set of facts usually gives the impression that all is well.

Lessons must be learnt – but how?

– “Lessons must be learned” is almost as familiar as the phrase “Post Office IT Scandal”. But the Whitehall machine is not set up to learn lessons from big IT-based project calamities. There is no institutional memory, civil servants come and go and each big IT project is regarded internally as unique.

– The private sector also has notorious IT disasters but, because the job of one or more senior executives may be at risk and the bottom line is of deep concern, the same mistakes tend not to be repeated.

– The public sector has its major and less visible IT successes. Perhaps the most unexpected success was the performance of Universal Credit during the pandemic.

Arguably the success of Universal Credit in recent years is because the systems had such a deserved bad press in their early years that it smoothed the path, politically, for serious faults to be admitted and therefore addressed.

Normalising deviance

– The deviant Whitehall conventions that are among the contributory underlying causes of the Post Office IT scandal don’t need to be written down or spoken about because they are an accepted part of Whitehall’s culture. Senior officials know how to act on the conventions without being told. But that self-protective, secretive, fault-denying culture is one reason few major figures from the world of private sector IT have lasted long in the Whitehall system.

– No incoming government has a vested interest in correcting deviant conventions. Prime ministers and their senior officials benefit from an absence of effective, independent and contemporaneous checks and balances and the non-reporting of IT project weaknesses. The non-reporting especially. After decades of campaigns for open government on IT projects still today there is no public reporting of faults in government systems other than in spasmodic, though usually thorough, reports of the National Audit Office. The Post Office is legally exempt from the National Audit Office’s scrutiny as are many public bodies.

Whitehall’s versions of the truth

– Ministers and officials have responded to criticisms about the non-reporting of publicly-funded failing IT-based projects by publishing a yearly (sanitised) report under the banner “Transparency Data” in which departments give their own summary of the status of their major programmes and projects. The government’s Infrastructure and Projects Authority publishes the report. But officials can in practice say what they want in the summaries. A project that is many years late and over budget can be recorded as on time and to budget if the project was secretly “reset”. The summaries give a red/amber/green status on major projects but the colour-coding is a subjective assessment that is not open to scrutiny. Convention dictates that departments mustn’t publish the internal reports on which their annual summaries are based. Thus nobody knows whether the annual summaries of projects tell the whole truth or not.

– The often-excellent recommendations in reports of the National Audit Office and Parliamentary committees that look at major IT and other projects are unenforceable.

– Given that public institutions operate in a world where they cannot go bust and there is no fear of individual consequences when things go wrong, the checks and balances need to be demonstrably rigorous and independent rather than deferential, in-house and largely confidential as now.

As the main fear of senior officials and political leaders is embarrassment, contemporaneous publication of internal reports on IT project faults could make the difference between success and failure on major projects such as Horizon. But some mandarins may choke on the words “full disclosure”.

– In the Post Office IT scandal, the main defence of those who allowed it happen is expected to be that they didn’t know the truth. Nobody seems to have known the whole truth. The Post Office didn’t even tell the whole truth to a High Court judge in the Bates v Post Office litigation. The systemic problem is that the whole truth doesn’t seem to have mattered to anyone in authority. It didn’t matter to governments if business officials were misled by the Post Office over Horizon’s robustness. No business department officials were going to jeopardise their job by accepting the Post Office’s version of events rather than sub-postmasters’. Business department officials would occasionally question the Post Office on its finances but rarely on its IT systems. On IT, the Post Office had operational autonomy. It was entirely within Whitehall conventions that officials usually took the Post Office’s assurances about Horizon at face value.

Remarkable lack of suspicion

– Some former postal ministers have suggested they were given misleading briefings about Horizon which is likely to be true. Officials had themselves been misled by the Post Office. It’s also possible that the whole truth became lost in the Post Office’s secretive silo culture. But the general lack of curiosity among those in authority seems remarkable. Early in the new millennium, Alan Bates, later joined by other former sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses, wrote to constituency MPs about losing their livelihoods after unexplained shortfalls shown on Horizon. Those MPs then wrote to ministers. James (now Lord) Arbuthnot was a particularly active and campaigning MP as was Kevan Jones. Computer Weekly had published its first in-depth piece on the scandal, written by Rebecca Thomson, in 2009. It was also generally known that no IT system is infallible especially a complex one – and Horizon was said to have been the biggest system of its kind in Europe. An obvious question for incoming postal ministers or business officials to keep asking was: “Could the sub-postmasters be right about Horizon causing shortfalls given that no system is perfect?” Suspicion ought to have been the reaction to assurances that the system could not cause unexplained shortfalls. But neither officials nor ministers had any need for suspicion. A lack of suspicion was entirely within Whitehall’s conventions. Nobody was going to be fired for a lack of suspicion – or complacency. Indeed postal ministers have been briefed in recent years that if there were any genuine miscarriages of justice to do with Horizon there were procedures within the criminal justice system to correct them. Whitehall conventions almost guarantee official complacency when things go wrong.

– Nothing can be done to change the Whitehall convention in which senior officials will tell their ministers only what the officials want the minister to know.

– A technology journalist was some years ago asked to have an unofficial meeting in the House of Commons with a health minister who was sceptical about a briefing she’d received from her officials. It transpired that the minister was right to be concerned: the briefing paper she’d been given was one-sided and reflected the department’s self-interests. But it’s conceivable that officials who wrote the paper were acting in what they considered the national interest.

Jonathan Swift

– One business minister, exceptionally, seems to have challenged the Post Office’s complacency over Horizon. In 2015 Baroness Neville-Rolfe asked the Post Office’s incoming chairman to look at possible miscarriages of justice and whether the Post Office had behaved fairly and responsibly. The Post Office agreed but ordered an investigation from a safe pair of hands, a former top government lawyer memorably named Jonathan Swift. An important ten-part analysis of Swift’s final report has been written by Richard Moorhead, a professor of law and professional ethics at Exeter Law School. One of his conclusions is that the Swift review was a lost opportunity to “surface and deal with life-shattering miscarriages of justice years sooner rather than later”.

– Strangely the Swift report was not shown to the Post Office board. Indeed, it remained undisclosed in the Bates v Post Office litigation. Its public disclosure could have prevented the litigation which cost a total of nearly £100m.

Secrecy – a British disease?

– Nobody can do anything about Whitehall’s preoccupation with secrecy. It is said to the British disease. Francis (now Lord) Maude, Cabinet minister in the Coalition government, tried to bring into effect what he called the “most transparent government ever” but his reforms were widely derided among the higher-ups in the civil service and most of the changes he initiated have since been reversed.

– It’s difficult to see a time when any part of central government will embrace for its own good the idea of genuine openness and transparency. Indeed the concealing of faults on a major publicly-funded IT system such as Horizon is as easy today as it was between 2000 and 2019.

– The Freedom of Information Act has made government a little more open than it used to be. But most of what is released under the Act by the Post Office and the Department for BEIS has entire paragraphs and pages redacted (blacked out). The Act was supposed to give the public a right to know. Rather it seems to be interpreted by many public institutions as giving officials the right not to disclose the whole truth.

Government and big, complex technology-based schemes don’t always mix. Genuine successes seem to defy the natural order. The National Audit Office was right to point out last year that,

“Despite 25 years of government strategies and countless attempts to deliver digital business change successfully, the findings of this report show a consistent pattern of underperformance.

“This underperformance can often be the result of programmes not being sufficiently thought through before key decisions on technology solutions are made. This means that there is a gap between what government intends to achieve and what it delivers to citizens and service users, which wastes taxpayers’ money and delays improvements in public services.”

Comment:

Much credit is due Sir Wyn Williams, chairman of the Horizon inquiry, who has understood completely the frustrations and the harm to decent honest people who had the misfortune to be using an accounts system when it was not working as expected.

There is no doubt Sir Wyn will do what he can to mitigate the wrongs within the inquiry’s terms of reference. But an inquiry into the Post Office and Fujitsu’s Horizon system cannot fix the underlying wrongs that cost hundreds of self-made people their livelihoods, their savings, their homes, their savings and sometimes their lives.

Indeed, looking back on the scandal from its origins, it is remarkable how well the government machine has managed to brush off 19 years of official untruths and the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history.

It is as if a Whitehall conveyor belt is feeding all the untruths and injustices into a large box marked “Post Office Horizon system – untruths and injustices for archiving”.

Whitehall officials and successive government ministers have escaped scrutiny or criticism. The only people who have suffered are the hundreds who were punished by a system that will continue as it is. The “us and them” system will continue to punish the unprotected, which is why sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses are still fighting for full and fair compensation.

The current government machine is ripe for misuse, witting or unwitting, by any number of the hundreds of other publicly-funded institutions that exist in the UK. Objective truth will continue to be nowhere in sight when big government IT-based projects go wrong. This is currently the case on the Ministry of Justice’s £250m Common Platform and the Home Office’s £11.4bn Emergency Services Network.

It is a deeply dysfunctional Whitehall system that political and civil service leaders will continue to describe as “world-beating” or the Rolls-Royce of government administrations, the envy of democratic countries across the world. All these claims are no more credible than the official claims – which lasted 19 years – that Horizon was robust.

Failures in the government administrative machine ought in no way to reflect badly on the many excellent and fully committed civil servants who often have to work against the system to succeed in what they do.

Full and fair compensation

How, in the Post Office scandal, will it be possible to single out one or two people as culpable?

The Horizon ideology gripped generations of Post Office boards, officials and prosecutors. State-supported aggression and mendacity in the name of the national interest was widespread within a formerly much-respected public institution. Within government, nobody persisted with asking the right questions about Horizon or the persecution of sub-postmasters because such challenges to the system were unwelcome. The main perpetrator of the Post Office IT scandal, the Mr Big, is not any one individual because the miscarriages of justice have continued so far for 22 years. About 80 convictions have been overturned but most victims are still waiting for full and fair compensation.

Journalist Nick Wallis who wrote the book The Great Post Office Scandal is unaware of anyone who has received full and fair compensation. It is remarkable that still after 22 years nobody in government is demanding that, finally, right is done before any more victims die.

The Mr Big in the Post Office IT scandal is the unreformable Whitehall system that not only let the large-scale misery happen but remained the Post Office’s silent investor in the extraordinarily unequal fight against sub-postmasters in the High Court. It wasn’t just unequal in money terms. One one side were sub-postmasters who’d had their livelihoods, homes and money taken from them by an aggressive state institution where responsibility was collective. The sub-postmasters were fighting for a return of their money and a semblance of their former lives. On the other side was the Post Office whose officials had lost nothing. The Whitehall system of operational autonomy allowed the Post Office to pour tens of millions of pounds into a legal fight to prove a point: that they were right about Horizon all along.

Justice in the case came only because of the single-minded tenacity of Alan Bates, his good fortune in having a gifted legal team and the final judgments of a genuinely independent and proficient High Court judge, Mr Justice Fraser, whom the Post Office tried to remove.

The government machine has reacted to the litigation it lost by managing to escape paying full and fair compensation in most cases although it is two years since the litigation ended. The Horizon inquiry may name and shame which is an important part of its task. But apart from tweaks the government machine will go on much as before.

Nobody doubts that Sir Wyn cares – really cares – but he has no power to change the Whitehall conventions that let the Post Office scandal happen. Untruths will continue, unsuccessful IT-based projects will continue to be passed off as successes, a pre-occupation with positive statements that conceal the truth will continue, individual consequences for bad decisions will continue to be non-existent, and the system as a whole will continue to escape scrutiny as the focus, whenever anything goes seriously wrong, will be on the specific institution(s) involved.

Given that most of the underlying causes of the Post Office IT scandal cannot be tackled, it is to Sir Wyn’s credit that he is concentrating the inquiry’s attention on full and fair compensation and on naming and shaming. These are challenges enough.

Perhaps nothing less than a Royal Commission into the Civil Service could bring any hope of a wider change in Whitehall’s deviant, reform-resisting conventions that let the Post Office IT scandal happen – and are now helping it to ulcerate.

Origins of a disaster by researcher Eleanor Shaikh

The Great Post Office Scandal by journalist Nick Wallis

Post Office attacked sub-postmasters who questioned Horizon, say victims – Karl Flinders, Computer Weekly

Prof Richard Moorhead’s 10-part analysis of the “Swift” review of Horizon miscarriages of justice

Investigating the Post Office scandal – podcast by journalist Nick Wallis and Rebecca Thomson who wrote the first articles on the scandal for Computer Weekly in 2009

The harm judges do – Lee Castleton’s story by barrister Paul Marshall

Scandal at the Post Office – The intersection of law, ethics and politics – Paul Marshall

Horizon issues log – campaigner Tim McCormack’s blog

The scandal’s fixable and unfixable underlying causes

By Tony Collins

Retired judge Sir Wyn Williams deserves much credit for the sensitive and thorough way he is chairing a public inquiry into the Post Office IT scandal. He said on You Tube last week that the evidence he has read and heard on the human impact has “made a deep impression upon me”. He added,

“On any view, the scale of the human suffering has been and in many cases continues to be very significant.”

He said he had an overriding duty to lay bare who knew what, when they knew it and what they did with the knowledge they acquired. “I am determined to expose the truth about these matters,” he said.

He may go much further. It’s conceivable he will urge Parliament to act on continuing delays in paying victims full and fair compensation.

But why the scandal happened and its underlying causes are questions not often asked. These articles look at possible answers to those questions. One conclusion is that the Post Office IT scandal was waiting to happen.

Part A is a summary of what could be said to be the scandal’s more obvious contributory causes, most of which are fixable. Part B is a summary of the underlying causes, few of which are fixable.

First, some of the scandal’s more obvious causes:

Part A: summary of the scandal’s more obvious contributory causes

– The Post Office is 100% owned by government and has many more branches than Tesco has stores. In 2000, the Post Office gave the go-ahead for a nationwide roll-out of a flawed outsourced accounts system, Horizon.

– The Post Office board knew that Horizon’s “accounting integrity” was uncertain at the time. But still Horizon was rolled out to 18,000 branches, according to Post Office board minutes in January 2000. Arguably, the single most important feature of any accounts system is its accounting integrity.

– Any large or small company that mistakenly buys an accounting system with uncertain accounting integrity is likely to reject it. The Post Office didn’t.

– Rejecting Horizon, even if the Post Office had wanted to, was fraught with difficulty. The contractor ICL (owned by Fujitsu) had strong political support.

– On the previous version of Horizon, a telegram from the British ambassador in Tokyo to No 10, the Cabinet Office and HM Treasury referred to a dispute over the project’s uncertain future. The telegram said,

“PROJECT HORIZON: ICL/FUJITSU VIEWS …FUJITSU COULD NOT UNDERSTAND HOW HMG [Her Majesty’s Government] COULD CONTEMPLATE QUOTE DESTROYING ICL UNQUOTE. IF THE PROJECT FAILED, THE FLOTATION OF ICL WOULD BE UNDERMINED AND FUJITSU WOULD RECONSIDER ALL ITS OPTIONS ON ICL. THIS MIGHT … INCLUDE SALE … A FAILURE OF PROJECT HORIZON WOULD UNDERMINE FLOTATION AND WOULD RESULT IN 700- 900 JOB LOSSES.”

The then prime minister Tony Blair preferred a reconciliation with Fujitsu. A settlement came, in part, in the form of the purchase of a truncated version of Horizon [called Horizon mark 2 for the purpose of this article], which was the system at the heart of the Post Office IT scandal.

Convention on not suing major IT suppliers to government

– The supply of big systems to central government has pros and cons. Among the cons are that the supplier may have to pay for large IT teams assigned to a particular project such as Horizon while government officials take weeks and sometimes months to take key decisions. One of the pros is that, once you are the chosen supplier, the chances of being de-selected are slim indeed, no matter what problems arise. The Post Office’s accepted a flawed Horizon mark 2 against this backdrop: there was little or no chance in practice of Fujitsu’s being asked to quit.

– Major international IT companies are willing to sue government if the circumstances warrant it but that willingness is not mutual. Senior politicians and civil service leaders do not want to confront one of their major technology suppliers in an open courtroom. One reason is that officials in the witness box may be challenged in public on their truthfulness and whether parts of Whitehall are dysfunctional. This reluctance of governments to sue their most familiar IT suppliers can put international technology companies in an extraordinarily powerful position in any serious dispute.

Lack of courage

– One of a series of Downing Street papers unearthed by researcher Eleanor Shaikh said that a lesson from the failure of Horizon [mark one] was that government lacked “courage” when it came to terminating a failing IT project. The paper said,

“Perhaps the most important lesson is a more general one: namely that when a project is clearly failing government needs to be bolder about cutting its losses, and tougher in its negotiating stance. There was a clear case for termination 12 months ago, although the Treasury and DTI [now the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy which funds the Post Office] favoured continuation. In effect, inertia led to continuation, since no-one at the centre had a sufficiently clear remit or reason to terminate. Throughout this period ICL assumed that the government would not have the courage to terminate. Only at the last minute, when they believed that cancellation was a real possibility, did they make real concessions. As a result the Post Office slipped a year in its automation strategy, and large sums of money were wasted both by government and by ICL.”

– Several decades ago, when government took the risk of putting officials in the witness box in a public context, two cases, Matrix Churchill and Peter Wright, proved particularly embarrassing for Whitehall and the government: Whitehall’s sometimes-distant relationship with the truth was exposed in both cases. A senior official in the Matrix Churchill case said, under questioning, that “truth is a difficult concept”. Journalist and author Richard Norton-Taylor wrote a book about the case. A different senior official in the Peter Wright case referred to a letter that had been “economical with the truth”. By not suing international IT suppliers in an open courtroom, government and Whitehall avoid the risk of this sort of embarrassing testimony.

Lack of open competition

– For the specific Horizon system the Post Office accepted for roll-out to branch post offices, there was no open competition. Competition was for the previous mark 1 version of Horizon. Fujitsu was then, as now, in an unassailably powerful position as a major IT supplier to the UK government.

– Big companies in the private sector, if contracting out core IT, usually maintain a level of control of the outsourced system and spend much time and care to ensure they fully understand the technology’s weaknesses throughout its life. Evidence has come to light that the Post Office’s understanding of Horizon’s faults was limited; it did not always want to know the truth and for years did not know of, or at least denied, the existence of Fujitsu’s Horizon Known Error Log which contained records of thousands of faults. A further complication in understanding Horizon was that, when unexplained shortfalls appeared on branch systems, the Post Office was, in part, beholden to Fujitsu to determine whether its IT was at fault and in what way.

Lack of competence?

– A paper by Geoff Mulgan, then head of No. 10’s Strategy Unit at No 10 summarised the lessons learnt from the Horizon mark 1 disaster. Mulgan addressed his paper to Tony Blair. It was copied to leading officials and ministers: Jeremy Heywood, David Miliband, Geoffrey Norris, Lord Falconer, Sir Richard Wilson and Jonathan Powell. This and other No. 10 documents are included in Eleanor Shaikh’s remarkable 579-page document on the origins of the Horizon scandal. Mulgan’s paper to Blair said, “Throughout this process, the relative lack of competence of the Post Office and their failure to develop a proper business strategy has been a key failing.”

– The lessons-learnt paper for Blair on Horizon mark 1 also said that “by most criteria Horizon has been a fairly disastrous project”. It was “misconceived from the start, has faced continual delays and problems, has over the last year taken up huge amounts of ministerial and official time and has delivered in the end a far from optimal solution”. It was an inauspicious start for Horizon mark 2.

Scandal could have been avoided

– Almost as soon as the truncated mark 2 version of Horizon began rolling out across the UK, sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses began noticing unexplained shortfalls in their branch balances. Had the Post Office, knowing from the start that Horizon’s accounting integrity was uncertain, tenaciously pursued an explanation for every shortfall with Fujitsu and written off losses where necessary, as supermarkets write off shrinkages, a scandal could have been avoided.

– Corporate Post Office staff knew that Horizon had faults but it was difficult for them to establish the facts after sub-postmaster complaints, for at least two reasons. First the system was not owned or controlled by the Post Office and access to the main audit database could be costly, beyond a pre-defined “free” level of queries. Second, staff regularly raised concerns about Horizon but their queries, it seems, usually went unanswered or unresolved: there appeared to be little appetite among the higher-ups at the Post Office for thorough investigations of Horizon.

Us and them

– Among the Post Office’s higher-ups there appeared to be a belief that Horizon’s faults could not become public knowledge in case it undermined ongoing legal cases or the institution’s reputation. There was also a concern that any general knowledge of bugs could be exploited by unscrupulous postal workers for their own financial gain.

– Before, during and after the roll-out of Horizon there appeared to be an “us and them” corporate scepticism of the honesty of sub-postmasters and their staff. One of those who worked on the original Horizon project said he suspected that many sub-postmasters would exploit system weaknesses if given the chance. In nearly every dispute with sub-postmasters over Horizon shortfalls, the Post Office appears to have been pre-disposed to assume the sub-postmaster was dishonest or incompetent.

– Large sums of money were handled by branch postal workers. Horizon, with the help of manual “transaction corrections”, had to be trusted as an electronic police force watching out for theft. But the commercial imperative to trust Horizon ought to have been tempered by a full knowledge of its weaknesses. Without this knowledge, the commercial need to believe in Horizon turned quickly into a corporate ideology – the system was to be trusted whatever the circumstances. This was an irrational approach to take with any large-scale IT system but the buzz-phrase in Whitehall for the Post Office was “operational independence“. It’s still a Whitehall buzz-phrase today. It means that when things go wrong at the Post Office, its operations can be said to be independent of the government. Thus the Post Office was left unchallenged over Horizon matters. It had the operational freedom to believe in the rationality of the irrational.

– When shortfalls began to appear on Horizon, there was no need to investigate them thoroughly because the Post Office had an assured way of covering losses that appeared on the system: the institution had one-sided contracts between the Post Office and branch sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses. The Post Office interpreted these contracts as requiring that sub-postmasters pay losses shown on the system, however big. The Post Office did not need to prove any actual money had gone missing. Sometimes it claimed phantom losses of more than £100,000.

– The Post Office went much further than claiming Horizon’s losses from sub-postmasters. It had its own 700-strong security community including a prosecuting authority that had no reliance on the Crown Prosecution Service or the police. Thus it began prosecuting postal workers for fraud, false accounting and theft on the basis of Horizon data. In the criminal and civil courts it achieved victory after victory. Each successful case added to the mythical status of Horizon as invincible. Successful cases also enabled the Post Office to confiscate homes, cars and other goods.

– Lee Castleton was a sub-postmaster who ended up having to pay the Post Office around £350,000. He was forced into bankruptcy. His case sent a clear message to other sub-postmasters who were experiencing unexplained shortfalls: if you try and challenge Horizon’s reliability you may go bankrupt too. [Today, 16 years later, Castleton still hasn’t recouped his losses despite various government and Post Office compensation schemes.] Castleton’s case was another symbol of the Post Office’s extraordinary operational freedom. If the Post Office today wanted to again spend £320,000 chasing a debt of £27,0000 in a different case it could. Barrister Paul Marshall has covered the Castleton case in his paper “The harm that judges do“.

– Judges were content to trust Horizon without proof of the system’s integrity or reliability. They sent sent dozens of people to prison on the basis of data from a faulty system. There was no requirement for juries to see facts such as Horizon’s error logs. In this respect, the UK joins authoritarian regimes across the world where people can be imprisoned without fair trials.

– No action is taken against prosecutors who don’t disclose relevant evidence. The UK courts, as currently set up, seem unwilling to punish the prosecution’s concealment of IT facts.

– When presented with Horizon cases, the courts had before them one poorly-funded man or woman in the dock. On the prosecution side were the statements of an international computer company and the Post Office, a well-funded public institution with a reputation for being a vital asset to local communities. For the person in the dock, establishing any credibility against such formidable legal opponents was difficult or impossible.

– Judges and juries, when presented with data from a system that was used successfully by thousands of postal workers every day, could not see how Horizon would be at fault in the one particular case before them.

– The accused stood little or no chance of proving their innocence by establishing that Horizon’s faults could show themselves in out-of-the-ordinary circumstances. The Post Office did not have always have unlimited “free” access to Horizon’s audit data and the courts did not require its disclosure.

– No serving judge has called for a reform of the criminal justice system in the light of wrongful convictions of more than 700 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses. This implies that judges and the courts would be content to convict another 700 innocent people if a different public institution were gradually, over 13 years, to prosecute hundreds of unfortunates by mistake on the basis of data from faulty computer system. In recent years, faulty data used by two other public institutions, the Ministry of Justice [“Common Platform”] and the Department of Work and Pensions [Universal Credit] have already had harmful consequences for individuals.

– The Post Office seems not to have noticed that a mass of prosecutions (more than 700) followed Horizon’s introduction. Before Horizon prosecutions were rare. Such was the Post Office lack of corporate awareness of its Horizon prosecutions that it kept assuring ministers and constituency MPs that the number of complaints about Horizon was “tiny”. In some letters to constituency MPs, the Post Office referred to Horizon complaints as numbering two, three or four – in total.

-The Post Office had no need to care whether the number of prosecutions was tiny, dozens or hundreds. As at the business department, an absence of the whole truth goes unpunished.

– The Post Office is without effective independent scrutiny. Had it not been for the public inquiry into the Horizon scandal, which was prompted by a High Court action against the Post Office led by former sub-postmaster Alan Bates, at a cost to his side of £46m, the Post Office would have remained protected from effective independent scrutiny. After the public inquiry, the Post Office is likely to revert to being a protected organisation.

– The business department BEIS may say that its oversight of the Post Office is subject to independent and effective scrutiny, at least though the Government Internal Audit Agency.

But the audit agency is, arguably, neither independent nor effective. On independence, it is one group of government officials marking the homework of another group of government officials. On effectiveness, its reporting is wordy, deferential in tone, generous in the use of business jargon and vague in a way that seems to say, “would you mind acting on our suggestions, perhaps?” Indeed, the agency suggested minor improvements to BEIS’s scrutiny of the Post Office in October 2019 which was three years after Alan Bates and his team had sued the Post Office. The agency’s audit reports on the Post Office are not published routinely. Nor do we know when or whether its audit suggestions are acted on. [What little we do know about the audit agency in relation to Horizon was unearthed by Eleanor Shaikh under the FOI Act.]

Shocked

– The business department BEIS could argue that the Post Office has independent scrutiny through Parliamentary committees and MPs’ questions. But Parliamentary committees have no power to enforce their recommendations. Nor can they force officials to be truthful. Former head of the Public Accounts Committee, MP Margaret Hodge, wrote a book “Called to Account” which suggested officials (out of loyalty to their department and ministers) rarely told the whole truth. At one hearing, Hodge shocked civil service leaders by calling for a bible and requiring a government lawyer to swear an oath to tell the truth. Later, the then head of the civil service made a formal complaint about Hodge.

– On whether MPs’ written and verbal Parliamentary questions provide effective and independent scrutiny, ministers, based on their civil service briefings, rarely give statements on IT projects that tell the whole truth. It’s not that ministers and or their officials are being mendacious: they are not telling the whole truth in the national interest, to insulate the government from possible embarrassment.

– The public spending watchdog the National Audit Office [NAO] is not permitted by law to audit the Post Office’s accounts, its computer systems or whether its decisions represent value for money for taxpayers. To a limited degree, the NAO was allowed to audit Horizon mark 1 but not subsequent versions. Mark 1 was eligible for investigation only because of the involvement in the scheme of a government department, now the Department for Work and Pensions. When the department ceased to be involved in Horizon, which was more than 20 years ago, the NAO ceased its investigations of the Post Office.

– The Post Office resisted independent scrutiny on the basis that it could restrict its commercial freedom. It opposed a political move to make the Post Office subject to oversight by the National Audit Office and, in the past, has challenged the role of the government’s one shareholder on the Post Office board.

A scandal waiting to happen

– The lack of effective independent scrutiny gives the Post Office an extraordinary operational autonomy. It has no shareholders except the government, it cannot go bust because it is publicly-owned, funding from taxpayers for costly mistakes is potentially unlimited and it has a remit to be commercially opportunistic but with no personal consequences for high-risk or for bad decisions. It could be argued that the Post Office IT scandal was waiting to happen.

– Government statements about the Post Office usually begin with words about the importance of branches to local communities and the country. It is therefore conceivable that Post Office’s senior managers and directors saw Horizon’s reliability as tied in with their organisation’s commercial interests and, therefore, the national interest, the two being the same. But almost anything can be justified in the name of the national interest, such as the shredding of important documents and denying that Fujitsu staff could change the balances of branch accounts without the knowledge of sub-postmasters.

– Some describe the Post Office as evil because it destroyed many lives. In some cases the Post Office’s pursuit of sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses over supposed Horizon losses is said to have been a contributory factor in premature deaths and suicides. The events of the scandal indeed have no equal in scale and mendacity with any that have darkened the UK’s corporate record. But an allied tragedy may be that those at the Post Office, whose aggressive actions inflicted harm on thousands of independent business people who ran branches, might have been serving the Post Office as best they could. Doing the right thing didn’t come into it, except that right was whatever was judged to be in the Post Office’s best commercial interests. One illustration of this remarkable loyalty to the Post Office was a lack of truthfulness in some of the evidence given to the High Court in the Bates v Post Office civil litigation. The judge Mr Justice Fraser said several of the Post Office’s senior witnesses gave what he called a “party line” which was not always truthful. But how did a publicly-funded institution end up with the freedom to be untruthful and act as aggressively it did? One answer is that it had no effective independent scrutiny. Indeed, the organisation that supposed to be scrutinising the Post Office – the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy – was not itself subject to effective independent scrutiny (Part B).

– Mr Justice Fraser’s High Court judgments included a finding that the Post Office seemed to operate in a parallel world. He compared some of the Post Office’s logic to a Lewis Carroll nonsense rhyme. But these findings caused no alarm in government or the business department BEIS which funds the Post Office.

– By not imposing any effective independent scrutiny, successive governments seem to have left the Post Office with one foot in reality and the other in a parallel world where reality was sometimes interpreted in an abnormal way.

– Trigger events for going into a parallel world seemed to be the perception of external threats such as Mr Justice Fraser’s unwelcome findings, thorough analyses of Horizon-related problems by forensic accountants Second Sight and unflattering coverage of Horizon by media organisations such as BBC’s Panorama. In response to these perceived “threat” events, the Post Office sacked Second Sight, tried to remove the judge and made representations to the BBC and other media organisations about their actual or intended coverage of Horizon-related matters.

– But by far the biggest challenge to the Post Office’s Horizon ideology came from sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses. We know how the Post Office reacted.

– One major contributory cause of the Post Office IT scandal, therefore, is that nobody in government or the business department BEIS had any particular wish to ensure the Post Office always had both feet in the real world.

– Another major contributory cause is that criminal court judges can also operate in a parallel world when it comes to complex IT systems. They will assume a massively-complex computer system works properly merely on the basis of the owners’ say-so. The owners need to produce no evidence of what they say and can usually hide the system’s faults with impunity.

Most of the above contributory causes of the scandal can be fixed. Most of the underlying causes listed in Part B (which is scheduled for tomorrow) cannot.

Origins of a disaster by researcher Eleanor Shaikh

The Great Post Office Scandal by journalist Nick Wallis

Post Office attacked sub-postmasters who questioned Horizon, say victims – Karl Flinders, Computer Weekly

Prof Richard Moorhead’s 10-part analysis of the “Swift” review of Horizon miscarriages of justice

Investigating the Post Office scandal – podcast by journalist Nick Wallis and Rebecca Thomson who wrote the first articles on the scandal for Computer Weekly in 2009

The harm judges do – Lee Castleton’s story by barrister Paul Marshall

Scandal at the Post Office – The intersection of law, ethics and politics – Paul Marshall

Horizon issues log – campaigner Tim McCormack’s blog

By Tony Collins

The Post Office’s maximum legal costs over the Horizon IT scandal are estimated to be about £177m – 16 times the compensation received by 500 victims whose High Court case exposed the UK’s widest miscarriage of justice.

A breakdown of the Post Office’s estimated costs is set out in a  letter from the postal affairs minister Paul Scully to Labour MP Darren Jones who chairs the House of Commons Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee. Scully’s letter follows a hearing of the committee in January 2022 on compensation related to the scandal. 

The Post Office, which is 100% owned by the government, used its own prosecutions unit to accuse about 700 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses of fraud, theft or false accounting on the basis of financial discrepancies – shortfalls – shown on the organisation’s Horizon accounts system. 

Dozens went to jail or were made bankrupt on the basis of unreliable data from the faulty Horizon system which was supplied by Fujitsu. The Post Office and Fujitsu hid Horizon’s faults from the courts.

In 2019, former sub-postmaster Alan Bates and his legal team won a group litigation against the Post Office which exposed Horizon’s faults and institutional mendacity on a grand scale.

Following the litigation, the Post Office set up various schemes to compensate victims of the scandal but Bates’ group is excluded from claiming under any of them.

To compound the group’s sense of injustice, Scully, Boris Johnson and other ministers have left Bates’ members to pay a £46m legal tab for taking on a state-owned institution in the High Court.  This means that the group’s members have received a total of about £11m in compensation – an average of only £20,000 each – from a £57.75m settlement. Many of the group’s members lost hundreds of thousands of pounds. But Scully’s ministerial speeches – which were drafted by officials at the Department for Business, Energy  and Industrial Strategy – say the High Court settlement was “full and final”.

Now it has emerged that the Department for BEIS expects maximum legal and related costs of about £177m for dealing with the Horizon IT scandal. This is 16 times the amount about 500 members of the Bates group have received in compensation.  

Below is a breakdown of costs and compensation as set out to the BEIS committee. Scully’s letter emphasises that some of the figures are the maximum possible cost, rather than the expected amounts. Scully also suggests there may be further costs in the coming year that have not yet been finalised.

The figures cover only the period after 2016 when the Bates group litigation began. The costs before the group litigation, including the Post Office’s Complaint Review and Mediation Scheme, are not included in the figures.

These are the figures from 2016 to 27 January 2022:

Costs

Horizon-related costs made within BEIS budgets and costs. The sums include maximum anticipated legal costs.

-£43m related to the Bates v Post Office High Court hearing which included the Post Office’s legal and professional consultancy fees connected with the litigation and other costs indirectly related to the litigation.

– £69m legal and administrative costs of the Historical Shortfall Scheme. It includes design, set-up and running costs of the scheme and is an estimate upon closure of the scheme once all payments have been made

– £16m current forecast of legal and administrative costs of paying compensation following overturned convictions (about £6m has been paid in such compensation to date).  

– £30m of “other Post Office costs” up to the end of 2021. This comprises legal fees relating to legal obligations, response and support activities in relation to postmasters who wish to appeal their Horizon-related convictions. It includes costs associated with identifying and contacting potential future appellants, discovery and disclosure of more than 4.5 million documents and preparation and representation at hearings before the Court.

– £19m of “other legal, project management, governance, operational reviews, improvement implementation and contracts, regarding Horizon-related issues and requirements, to the end of FY2021/22”.

Total £177m

*Additional cost estimates for the rest of 2021/22 and 2022/23 are not yet finalised. Scully says these figures will be provided in a future update to the BEIS Select Committee on Horizon-related costs.

Compensation

– £57.75m settlement of the 2016-2019 Bates v Post Office High Court case, of which about £46m went in Bates’ costs, leaving the “successful” litigants with £11m, an average of £20,000 each. Many lost hundreds of thousands of pounds in the scandal, including Lee Castleton who lost £348, 000 and went bankrupt.  

– £153m for the Historical Shortfall Scheme (likely estimated overall amount). There are 2,361 eligible claimants, about 900 of whom have received offers to date. How many have refused offers is unclear but the Post Office says the “vast majority” of the 900 have accepted an offer and have been paid.  

– £780m is the maximum potential spend on compensating those whose convictions have been overturned. It covers an interim payment of up to £100,000, which is paid within 28 days of an overturned Horizon-related conviction, and the final settlement. Actual costs will be determined by the total number of overturned convictions and the individual settlements reached. The £780m estimate comprises £94.4m for interim payments and £685.6m for final settlements.

Total: £990.75m

Government costs to date of the Horizon IT public inquiry

– £1.6m costs of running the inquiry in the years 2020/21 and 2021/22. The inquiry is not expected to finish until the summer of 2023 or possibly later.  

Comment

In the current era of Covid-related state spending that runs into hundreds of billions, £177m for the legal and related costs (excluding compensation) of dealing with Horizon IT scandal seems a small amount – until it is set against the paltry total of £11m paid to the Bates 555 group.

The business minister Scully and the prime minister Johnson express much sympathy for the ordeals suffered by the Bates 555. But ministerial sympathy costs nothing; it doesn’t return the 555 to the financial position they would be in now had the state not tried to ruin many of them.  

Nearly 120 MPs have signed an Early Day Motion calling for the Bates 555 litigants to “receive compensation that is commensurate with the suffering they have faced” and strongly urges the Government to “put in place an external compensation scheme that is outside the scope of the Post Office and provide this group with the redress they not only deserve but are entitled”.

In addition, the BEIS select committee has produced an excellent report this month that demands fair compensation for the Bates group.

But perhaps if Bates had access to the Post Office’s pot of money for lawyers, his campaign for fair compensation would not have to rely on a Parliamentary campaign for justice, a complaint to the Parliamentary Ombudsman and pressure on the government through media coverage.

Since the early 2000s, Bates’ campaign for justice has been a David and Goliath affair. Without access to the seemingly unlimited funds the Post Office enjoys, it still is.     

**

The British people are waking up to a scandal that happened under their noses – Computer Weekly

33 former staff died before getting justice in Post Office IT scandal – Daily Mail’s front page – 14 Feb 2022

The Great Post Office Scandal – by Nick Wallis

43 years of state IT disasters – and they’re still happening– Part 1

43 years of state IT disasters – and they’re still happening Part 2

43 years of IT disasters – and they’re still happening – Part 3

By Tony Collins

Post Office lawyers are to be investigated over claims that sub-postmasters were bullied into admitting crimes they didn’t commit, said the Sunday Mirror yesterday.

The Sunday Times also has a story yesterday under the headline “Post Office lawyers in Horizon scandal to be investigated”. It said the Solicitors Regulation Authority is investigating the part played by Post Office lawyers in Horizon-related convictions that have been overturned.

About 700 post office workers were wrongly prosecuted and some were jailed for theft, false accounting or fraud on the basis of “losses” shown on the Post Office’s Horizon system. In reality, the Post Office’s Horizon accounting system caused numerous unexplained shortfalls for which sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses were blamed. The Post Office and Horizon’s supplier Fujitsu hid the system’s faults from the criminal courts and civil court judges.

The Solicitors Regulation Authority [SRA] has applied to the High Court for an order under 44B of the Solicitors Act 1974, which can be used to require the provision of documents where the SRA is satisfied it is necessary to do so for the purpose of investigating whether there has been professional misconduct by a solicitor or whether there has been a failure to comply with any legal or regulatory obligations.

The SRA will normally only exercise this power as part of an investigation and where the solicitor has declined to offer up the requested documents voluntarily. But the Post Office said the wording of the  disclosure notice has been agreed with the SRA. It told the Law Society Gazette that it is “fully complying with the notice and will be providing relevant documents within the timeframe requested”. The Post Office said, “The disclosure notice does not relate to individuals that are involved with the Post Office today.”

It’s unclear whether the Solicitors Regulation Authority is committed to a full investigation of the possible misconduct of particular lawyers or whether it merely gathering documents. The Authority told the Sunday Mirror,

“We are gathering all relevant information before deciding any next steps.”

The SRA has been reluctant in the past to investigate lawyers involved in the Post Office Horizon scandal. Barrister Jacob Meagher is among critics of the SRA’s lack of action.  There are, however, a growing number of detailed complaints about lawyers involved in the scandal, which may make it difficult for the SRA to refuse a full investigation.

Among those who have written to the SRA is Aria Grace Law which represented Tracy Felstead, Janet Skinner and Seema Misra in their successful appeals against Horizon-related convictions. Aria Grace Law’s letter to the SRA’s Chief Executive Officer in May 2021 said,

“There is no doubt from the judgment of the Court of Appeal dated 23rd April 2021 that from 2013, the Post Office pursued a policy of denial that it knew of any substantial weakness or defect in the Horizon IT system. That was false. That strategy can only have been devised by the Post Office by and with reference to legal advice and by the Post Office board upon such advice. Doing so has been found by the Court of Appeal to have subverted the criminal justice system and to have undermined public confidence in it. My clients would like a personal assurance from you that the organisation of which you are CEO will be fully and effectively investigating this matter without any delay. On their behalf, I look forward to that confirmation.”

Sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses told the Horizon public inquiry last week that they were offered deals by Post Office prosecutors: if the accused agreed to plead guilty to false accounting and not mention Horizon, the Post Office would drop the more serious theft charge.

Among those who accepted the plea bargain was Jo Hamilton who was planning to plead not guilty to theft. Hamilton told the inquiry: “… The Post Office offered a plea bargain, ‘If you plead guilty to 14 counts of false accounting, don’t mention Horizon on sentencing and repay all the money [£36,000], we’ll drop the theft’.”

Hamilton agreed and was spared prison but given a supervision order and had a criminal record from 2008 until her conviction was quashed last year. She told the inquiry,

“It just is a horrible thing to be accused of dishonesty when you’re not dishonest.”

She had to re-mortgage and have a collection in the local community to “repay” £36,000 demanded by the Post Office because of Horizon-based shortfalls in her accounts. Her parents had strokes within three months of each other.  

Former sub-postmaster Noel Thomas accepted a Post Office plea bargain in which he agreed not to mention Horizon but he still went to prison. He had worked for the Post Office for 42 years. He told the Horizon inquiry that about 10 minutes before he went into court charged with theft his barrister approached him and said, ‘They’re offering you a bargain …They’re going to drop the theft as long as you take the charge of false accounting and also that you don’t mention Horizon’.  And I said, “Well, what does that mean? Will it keep me out of jail?” and he said, ‘Well, hopefully’.   I did sign a piece of paper with my barrister to say that I wouldn’t mention Horizon …” But still Thomas received a nine-month prison sentence.  His conviction was quashed last year.

In 2021, the Court of Appeal criticised the actions of some Post Office prosecutors and found that many of the accused were denied a fair trial. Even though the Post Office suspected the IT system was faulty, it continued to hound sub-postmasters through the courts.

In Hamilton’s case she discovered from a report by forensic accountants Second Sight that Post Office investigators had known that there was no evidence she had stolen anything or deliberately-inflated cash figures. Despite knowing this, the Post Office charged her with theft – until they dropped the charge as part of a plea bargain.

When Hamilton discovered the existence of the document containing the investigator’s comments, she asked the Post Office for a copy of his report, without success. Hamilton told the inquiry that when the report was not forthcoming, she emailed the Post Office saying she would get a copy of it from Second Sight. Hamilton told the inquiry

“… then they [the Post Office] wrote back to me and said, ‘You will never have that document. It’s a legally privileged document’ and they don’t know why Second Sight quoted it in their report.”

 But Hamilton eventually saw the document at the Court of Appeal hearings last year. At the Horizon inquiry last week she was asked whether it said exactly what Second Sight had reported it as saying.

“Yes, exactly,” said Hamilton. “There was that paragraph ‘having examined all the Horizon records, I can find no evidence of theft or deliberate cash inflated figures’.  But it was that piece that just made me so angry … why did they do that?”

The SRA has powers to give a written rebuke, impose a fine, publish details of the case, or disqualify the lawyer in question from acting as a head of legal practice or head of finance and administration or being a manager or employee. It can also refer a case to the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal which can strike off or suspend a lawyer for a specified period or indefinitely. The Tribunal can also impose unlimited fines.

Any further reluctance of the SRA to act decisively in the widest miscarriage of justice in British legal history may raise questions about whether it is unwilling to act against a major public corporation and its representatives. The Post Office is 100%-owned by government.

**

The British people are waking up to a scandal that happened under their noses – Computer Weekly

33 former staff died before getting justice in Post Office IT scandal – Daily Mail’s front page – 14 Feb 2022

The Great Post Office Scandal – by Nick Wallis

43 years of state IT disasters – and they’re still happening– Part 1

43 years of state IT disasters – and they’re still happening Part 2

43 years of IT disasters – and they’re still happening – Part 3

By Tony Collins

A cross-party committee of MPs has called on the government to commit urgently to “ensuring that the 555 are fully compensated for all of their losses on the same basis as other victims of this scandal receiving compensation”.

The committee’s statement refers to the 555 members of the Justice For Sub-postmasters Alliance who defeated the Post Office in the High Court in 2019 by proving that its Horizon system was faulty and caused shortfalls for which sub-postmasters were wrongly blamed.

Today’s report of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Committee asks the government to consider paying the 555’s legal fees, which were about £46m. It says the payment ought to be an interim amount pending determination of full compensation.

If the government agrees to pay the £46m it would mean average individual payments to the 555 of about £83,000.

To date, the Post Office has paid the 555 an average of only 20,000 each after costs. Typically, the 555 lost hundreds of thousands of pounds each.

The Post Office wrongly prosecuted more than 700 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses for fraud, false accounting or fraud on the basis of untrustworthy Horizon data. To date, only 72 convictions have been overturned. Most victims of the scandal are not seeking to have their convictions overturned. Some are known to want nothing more to do with the Post Office.

Today’s committee report is the first independent Parliamentary appraisal of the Post Office and ministerial actions since the end of the High Court action in December 2019. Much of the report will make uncomfortable reading for business ministers and senior civil servants.

It says,

“We are deeply disappointed that the 555 group action litigants, who took the Post Office Ltd. (POL) to court and who exposed the Horizon scandal, should be worse off than other victims of Horizon who would otherwise not be in a position to make claims.

“It is a perverse situation that the prolonged legal proceedings and the resulting delay to POL’s decision to settle have reduced the compensation the 555 were entitled to. Both the Post Office Ltd. and the Minister accept that this is unjust. We agree with the POL CEO, Nick Read, that it will be impossible for the POL to move forward until this issue is fully addressed. Our view is that the responsibility for addressing this injustice lies with the Government. Consideration should be given to recompense the legal fees of the 555 as an initial payment whilst full determination is considered.

“We demand that the Government as a matter of urgency commit to ensuring that the 555 are fully compensated for all of their losses on the same basis as other victims of this scandal receiving compensation.”

Some bullet points from the report:

• There’s an “unacceptable irony” that the Bates 555 group has made possible a “Historical Shortfall Scheme” for thousands of victims of the scandal but the group is itself denied access to fair compensation through the scheme.
• There’s a need for an independent intermediary body as a trusted first point of contact for those wrongly convicted because of Horizon, in particular for the 576 convicted sub-postmasters who have not yet come forward.
• The Committee wants monthly updates on the number of interim payments made for those whose convictions have been overturned, including the number of final payments made, and the range of amounts paid out to reach full, fair and final settlements. The report says this is needed “because of the nature of the Horizon scandal, transparency on these issues is crucial to restoring trust.”
• There’s a need for far more information on why some sub-postmasters whose convictions have been overturned are being denied interim compensation payments. The Committee will need convincing that the scheme has genuinely independent oversight.
• The Committee is “concerned that a firm involved with the discredited HBOS Reading scandal is involved with the Historical Shortfall Scheme, and that the Post Office Ltd. (POL) CEO was unaware of the issues surrounding the HBOS compensation scheme. Though Herbert Smith Freehills may have experience in establishing such schemes we are not reassured by the Minister or the POL CEO’s arguments that the issues associated with the HBOS scheme do not necessarily question their role in the Historical Shortfall Scheme. In responding to this report, we expect the Government to explain how the Historic Shortfall Scheme differs from the HBOS Reading scheme and what safeguards have been built in to avoid the problems that the latter scheme experienced.”
• There is much criticism in the Committee’s report of the Historical Shortfall compensation Scheme, which has received claims for compensation from more than 2,500 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses. The Committee questions the scheme’s independence and is concerned that the Post Office is involved in making initial recommendations regarding claims. It says that, given that the Post Office bears a major part of the responsibility for the Horizon scandal, “it seems perverse that POL is making initial recommendations regarding claims”. The Committee adds, “It is worth remembering that a key criticism made of POL at the height of the scandal was that effectively it acted as judge, jury and executioner when deciding on convictions of sub-postmasters.”
• The slowness in paying compensation claims means more claimants will die awaiting their cash, given their age profiles. “We are disappointed that so few claims have been processed by the Historic Shortfall Scheme considering it was closed over a year ago. The conclusion of only 30% of claims does not represent significant progress.”
• The Committee is concerned about the low amounts of compensation, the difficulties in making claims, the lack of support and expert advice available and onus being on the claimant to prove losses when the Post Office may not have the relevant paperwork.
• The Committee wants details of claims refused where there was paperwork missing.
• Given that the Post Office has profited from taking money from sub-postmasters on the basis of Horizon data, there needs to be a “significant level of benefit of doubt when compensation is calculated”.
• The Committee calls for more transparency over the costs of compensation schemes. The Committee noted that it hadn’t been told about a £685.6m direct grant to the Post Office over Post Office historical matters.

Comment – What happens now?

Ministers are free to accept or reject any of the Committee’s recommendations. They must, however, publish a formal response, usually within two months.

There is no doubt that the Committee’s report will add to pressure on government and the Treasury to pay at least the Bates 555 group’s £46m legal costs.

The traditional government reply to awkward reports of Parliamentary committees is to fudge, which can mean seeming to accept recommendations without actually acting on them. But the Parliamentary momentum for the Bates 555 to be properly and fairly compensated may now be too great for ministers to continue with the present undeclared strategy of promising much, talking regularly to the 555 and delaying actual government-funded compensation payments indefinitely.

That said, there is little appetite in Whitehall to pay the 555 any government money, especially as the group’s expose of the scandal has made the Post Office technically insolvent and created a huge amount of extra work for the civil service. There is also the technical problem of proving to the Treasury that compensating the 555 is value for money. This is where ministers come in. With the help of Downing Street and the Treasury, the Postal Affairs minister Paul Scully could make things happen. But to date he has been has been weak and vacillating.

The hope now is that’s BEIS’s commendable report will help create an unstoppable Parliamentary force for the right thing to be done. There is nothing in the report that any right-thinking person could denigrate or dismiss. The report is a landmark in the post-litigation era of the Post Office IT scandal.

**

MPs demand urgent compensation for Post Office scandal victim group – Computer Weekly

Post Office received £1bn taxpayer subsidy last year as part of IT scandal compensation – Karl Flinders, Computer Weekly

The Great Post Office Scandal

43 years of state IT-based project disasters and they’re still happening – Part 3 – Campaign4Change

Among the systemic reasons for around £40bn of IT-related failures may be truth decay, excessive secrecy, no consequences for getting it wrong and the misleading of Parliament – a decades-old “conceal-and-deny” approach.

A public inquiry into the Post Office IT scandal, chaired by a much-respected judge Sir Wyn Williams, is looking at the Horizon system as supplied by Fujitsu. But what of the Whitehall culture that made a cover-up of Horizon’s faults possible, a culture that makes central government, with some impressive exceptions, a dysfunctional buyer of large-scale IT systems?

By Tony Collins

Part 3 – The Whitehall Bubble

Libra and ICL [Fujitsu]  

The Libra project to computerise magistrates’ courts got off to a bad start when ICL [later rebranded Fujitsu] was the only bidder. Its bid price of £146m increased to £184m by the time the contract was signed seven months later. In the following year, 1999, ICL [which was by then starting to roll out its Horizon system to thousands of post offices], sought to renegotiate the Libra contract because its cash flow forecasts showed a £39m deficit over the life of the deal.

ICL said that it would be unable to continue with Libra if this gap in its finances could not be closed. It wanted the negotiations to be concluded by 21 March 2000 as it would otherwise have had to declare a loss in its 1999–2000 accounts. It needed to make a decision on whether to walk away by that date.

Whitehall officials and ICL agreed a revised contract for £319m over 14.5 years which included more PCs and printers. But ICL brought in a new management team that re-evaluated the plan and found it was not deliverable. ICL told the Department – a predecessor of the Ministry of Justice – that its forecast losses were now so high that it could not continue with the project unless the contract was substantially renegotiated.

This was the second time ICL wanted the contract renegotiated.

The supplier was in breach of the contract for failing to meet the delivery date for core software at the first courts site. But officials decided to negotiate with ICL rather than terminate the contract and sue for damages. Suing ICL appears never to have been a serious option given that civil service decision-makers had not been on hand when needed and there had been a lack of clarity at the start of the contract about exactly what the magistrates’ courts wanted. Suing was also not possible because Whitehall considered the systems too important to allow ICL to default.

In any case, Whitehall’s leaders would not let senior civil servants go into a witness box in an open courtroom where they might reveal how dysfunctional Whitehall departments could be, especially in the commissioning of large-scale IT-based systems.

One common result of the state’s dysfunctional IT buying big problem was that suppliers and buyers usually discovered only after contracts were signed that the project as configured was doomed.         

Walk away?

ICL told officials that its maximum potential loss on the project was £200m and that it would repudiate the contract unless the Department negotiated to cover the loss.

At one point, senior managers from ICL made it clear to project officials that deadlines were being dictated by their parent company, Fujitsu, in Japan.

Next, the Department and ICL signed a legally binding Memorandum of Understanding, which placed Whitehall officials in a less favourable position than they would have been if they had simply continued with the existing contractual arrangements and relied on existing contractual rights.

In the end, the Department signed a revised contract with ICL (by then known as Fujitsu Services) for £232m over 8.5 years to supply mainly PCs, printers and networks – but not the much more tricky software to handle magistrates’ cases. The software had been the main reason for buying the system.

Whitehall officials had to buy the case-handling software separately. This meant the total costs of Libra soared to £390m, up from the initial bid price of £146m. The Public Accounts Committee branded Libra as “one of the worst IT projects ever seen”.

That ICL had threatened to walk away from the contract and had twice sought to renegotiate it were state secrets until the National Audit Office produced an impressively-detailed report in 2003.

But the National Audit Office’s investigation came about because MPs on the House of Commons’ Public Accounts Committee persuaded the NAO to investigate. Had Computer Weekly not been publishing articles on Libra there might never have been an NAO report on the project.  

There are indeed no checks and balances within the Whitehall system to ensure that all major IT-related project failures are independently investigated or that Parliament is given a truthful picture when big programmes begin to fail.

Misleading Parliament by omission – the norm on major failing state IT-based projects

Parliament was given the impression all was well with Libra when the scheme was, in fact, at its lowest point. Parliamentary replies to MPs’ questions misled not by lies but by omitting inconvenient truths.

In November 2021, Conservative MP John Berkow, then in opposition, asked the Lord Chancellor’s Department for that year’s costs of Libra.

The government minister’s reply gave not a hint that ICL (then wholly owned by Fujitsu) was in breach of contract, threatening to repudiate the contract because of potential losses of £200m and the total estimated costs at that time had soared from the initial £146m to £319m. This was the reply ….

“The estimated costs of the Libra project in 2001–02 amount to £26.5 million. This is made up of internal costs, payments to ICL for the rollout of the first phase of the project and payments by the Magistrates Courts Service for the ongoing usage of Libra.”

That was the end of his reply. And not a hint that, at that time, new case-handling software for the courts had been delayed indefinitely.

Separately the Lord Chancellor and Chief Secretary to the Treasury published a combined report in 2001 that included Libra as one of their “achievements” of the past year.

Inconvenient truths were nowhere in sight. The report made no mention of Libra delays, major cost overruns or the supplier’s breach of contract and uncertainty over whether case management software would ever be rolled out successfully.

Instead, the report contained a foreword by then Lord Chancellor which used the future tense when referring to Libra. [It’s commonplace when things go wrong on major IT-related projects that Whitehall reports on what will be achieved, which avoids explaining the failures to date – a variation on the “conceal-and-deny” theme.]

The Whitehall report on Libra said,

“The Libra project will provide computer systems and equipment to around 500 magistrates’ courts in England and Wales. It will offer standard office automation throughout the magistrates’ courts and dedicated IT support for key business processes. The major benefits it will bring are:

– linking with other criminal justice organisations to speed the flow of information (joined-up service delivery);

– enabling police and other prosecuting authorities to provide summons information electronically;

– the provision of hearing information and key case information on a secure website for other criminal justice agencies and solicitors to access;

– a nationwide network infrastructure with external e-mail for all staff;

– courtroom computing – providing online access during hearings;

–  a data warehouse for policy evaluation and performance information;

–  potential for the future – the national infrastructure and central database provide the platform for re-examining business process and electronic service delivery.”

Watchdogs with few teeth  

Nick Davies, Programme Director at the Institute for Government, told LBC this month of weaknesses in checks and balances on the award of major state contracts. He said that watchdogs have limited power and not many teeth.  He said,

“The problem in so many of these cases is that government is effectively marking its own homework.”

He said that if watchdogs find something wrong they have to rely on government “to do the right thing”. But he added that “too often many governments but particularly this one” have shown that they do not think rules apply to them.

He also suggested that open government remains as elusive as ever. He said,

“Generally when it comes to government spending and transparency … this government has taken backward steps.”

He said that fewer freedom of information requests are being answered satisfactorily and government has failed to publish contract awards “months and months into the pandemic when the initial rush was over … when they were actually required to do so”.

Libra and other similarly-flawed government IT-based programmes suggest a structural failure of checks and balances in Whitehall. Although the National Audit Office and the Public Accounts Committee publish reports on some IT-based project failures, departments need pay no attention to any lessons when they come to buy new large-scale IT systems.      

In 2017, the Commons’ Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee said [Lessons still to be learned from Chilcott inquiry] that  

“… our system currently lacks ‘a statutory or a convention-based enforcement system to ensure compliance with proper standards and accepted rules of how government should be conducted’.”

The National Audit Office has also expressed concerns about Whitehall’s conflicts of interest in reporting impartially to Parliament in its report “Accountability for Taxpayers’ money”.”  

https://www.nao.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2016/02/Accountability-for-Taxpayers-money.pdf.

There is indeed nothing to stop governments continuing to commission flawed IT-based projects and giving falsely-reassuring statements to Parliament on their progress.

It means that the state, as a dysfunctional buyer of large-scale IT over decades, remains under no pressure to change.

Smart Meters – a failing £11bn programme or another Whitehall “success”?

The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy continues to issue reassuring statements on the roll-out of smart meters. One of its latest statements, in 2022, is this,

“Smart meter technology is designed to accommodate the evolution of communication services over time, meaning people’s original smart meters can remain connected.”

That may be the intention but is it a reality?

Many experts support the idea of smart meters in principle. But they say costs of the roll-out have soared and the technology – which does not work with 4G or 5G – has obsolescence built in. New “smart” meters work only on 2G or 3G which are to be phased out.  

Nick Hunn, a technology specialist at WiFore Wireless Consulting, last month told the Financial Mail on Sunday,

“Many billions more will now have to be spent replacing smart meters.”     

Alex Henney, a former Government adviser on energy said,

“What is being provided is obsolete equipment at a ludicrously high cost. This troubled roll-out of smart meters is nothing but a total waste of taxpayers’ money. 

“The Government does not seem to have given any thought about forcing smart meters on to us without realising they will become obsolete when the mobile signals change.” 

But the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, which is in charge of the smart meters roll-out, continues to publish statements that give no hint of any serious problems. The Department says on the GOV.UK website that the rollout is,

“… modernising the energy system and transforming the consumer experience by replacing traditional meters with smart meters. It is delivering accurate billing, advancing competition in energy provision, enabling faster and easier switching, and improving customer service and information.”

The Department describes the roll-out of smart meters as “successful”. It says the roll-out involves £13bn of private energy sector investment (which is to be recouped from consumers), delivers benefits of £19bn (which are unproven), and supports 15,000 jobs.

Inconvenient truths

The National Audit Office, in a report on smart meters, urged the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, to

“make sure the team culture does not become defensive, and resistant to inconvenient truths”.

In 2018, the National Audit Office reported that 70% of the original “SMETS 1” smart meters did not work when householders switched suppliers. It said,

“The facts are that the programme is late, the costs are escalating, and in 2017 the cost of installing smart meters was 50% higher than the Department assumed…

“The full functionality of the system is also dependent on the development of technology that is not yet developed.”

The NAO also said,

“ … it is currently uncertain whether the industry cost savings forecast by the Department will materialise.”

But the Department for BEIS is entitled to reject anything said by the National Audit Office in its value-for-money reports. Indeed, from BEIS’s viewpoint, it may be better support its ministers by continuing to be defensive and resistant to inconvenient truths than being candid about the roll-out’s problems which could lead to political embarrassment.  

It was left to Rachel Reeves MP, then head of the Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Select Committee, to tell it like it is. She said,

“The smart meter rollout has been beset by problems and delays… yet, from our evidence hearing and the subsequent Ministerial correspondence, the Government’s tendency is to sugar-coat and pretend that everything will turn out alright in the end.”

Her comment about “sugar-coat” could apply to almost every government statement on a major IT-based programme in the past 43 years.

But the absence of any compulsion to tell the truth about the state’s biggest IT-based projects could explain why Whitehall has found it easy to normalise a “conceal-and-deny” approach to its most egregious blunders.    

Part 4 – Pathway and Horizon – to follow

**

Moving witness statements to Post Office Horizon inquiry – transcripts and video:

Day 1 – 14 February 2022

Day 2 – 15 February 2022

33 former staff died before getting justice in Post Office IT scandal – Daily Mail’s front page – 14 Feb 2022

The Great Post Office Scandal – by Nick Wallis

43 years of state IT disasters – and they’re still happening– Part 1

43 years of state IT disasters – Part 2

By Tony Collins

Last week Campaign4Change published a list of major IT projects where, when things went seriously wrong, Parliament was not told the whole truth and sometimes nothing like the truth.  

The article said that, among the systemic reasons for around £40bn worth of state IT-related failures, may be truth decay, excessive secrecy, no consequences for getting it wrong and the misleading of Parliament – a decades-old “conceal-and-deny” approach.

Part 2 – Slippery with the truth

Margaret Hodge, former minister and chairwoman of the Public Accounts Committee, wrote in her book “Called to account” about the slipperiness of some witness evidence on IT and other projects.

In one case, a whistle-blower sent her committee a brown package of papers, including departmental documents, which directly contradicted evidence given to the committee by a senior Whitehall official. 

About two decades before, a senior civil servant had told the Scott inquiry that truth is a “very difficult concept“. He was referring to the information (or rather the misinformation) given to Parliament over the so-called Matrix Churchill affair.

All of which raises a question of how it is possible for most big state IT-related projects to succeed when their leaders work under cover of state secrecy, are not held responsible when large programmes fail and are working within a Whitehall system that encourages the omission of key facts in Parliament statements, replies and evidence to committees.

Disinformation, which implies an intent to deceive, is rare. But civil servants draft ministerial speeches and Parliamentary replies on IT-related projects with, it seems, a loyal intent to desensitize, or cushion the effect, of what ministers tell MPs and peers when things go wrong. Negatives are turned into positives – what the National Audit Office has calls a “good news” culture or a “bunker mentality”.

On the £9.3bn Emergency Services Network [ESN] project, which is £3.1bn over budget, the Public Accounts Committee said in 2019,

“An unhealthy, ‘good news’ culture in the Department [Home Office] meant it failed to heed warning signs that the programme was undeliverable. Many of the issues with the Department’s original approach were foreseeable and should have been challenged earlier…

 “We have been warning that ESN is a high-risk programme since 2016, but only now does the Department accept that it was too optimistic about how long it would take to build ESN. The Department admits that where problems had been identified, they were not escalated properly, which meant the Department missed opportunities to correct its approach earlier.”

Home Office secrecy was such that even the departmental head of the ESN project, the senior responsible owner, was not shown a key internal report on some of the issues and risks with programme including an unclear approach to managing the scheme’s several suppliers.

It meant that the UK senior responsible owner of one of the biggest IT-related programmes in Europe was kept in the dark by his own staff on a key report about the project’s difficulties.

Subsequently, the Home Office sought a new senior responsible owner (at a salary of £140,000) for the ESN programme.

This job search negated the whole point of having a senior responsible owner as a senior civil servant who saw a major project through from start to finish.

Problem? What problem?

Officially, the Emergency Services Network is on course to be a transformative success. This was a glowing Home Office account of the project on GOV.UK,

“ESN will transform emergency services’ mobile working, especially in remote areas and at times of network congestion. It will create a single platform for sharing data and imagery and enable faster adoption of successful mobile applications. ESN also represents value for money for the taxpayer through delivering steady state savings of over £200 million per year.”

Indeed, GOV.UK currently has a 1,500-word account of the project and not a sentence hints that the project has been beset by seven years of delays, an overspend of £3.1bn, the use of technology that may be obsolete by the time it is due to roll out in 2024, or a dependence meanwhile on a 22 year-old “Airwave” communications system that costs £1.7m a day to run.

It is perfectly possible a new government will pull the plug on the whole programme, in part because, by 2024, police, ambulance or fire services may not want to pay for the rising costs of the system.

Unreassuringly, the GOV.UK website on the ESN programme has not been updated for a year. Also, as is routine on big IT-related programmes, the government and Whitehall have published no internal progress reports on the scheme.

Tensions are known to exist between the Home Office and at least one of the scheme’s main suppliers. But in Parliament ministers continue to give an impression all is well. Indeed the then policing minister denied last year that the programme was in trouble.

He told the House of Commons last year,  “The programme continues to make steady progress, and confidence in the technical viability of the solution continues to increase. The core network has been built, and much of the ultimate functionality has already been demonstrated. We are working hard to demonstrate the emerging product and agree realistic plans with users for the final stages of delivery and deployment.”

The obvious contrast between ministerial assurances on the Emergency Services Network programme and its potentially fatal problems suggests that the state’s implicit decades-old strategy of “conceal and deny” on major IT-based programmes remains active.     

As a footnote to the minister’s assurances on the programme, he told Parliament that the cost of the Emergency Service Network “is actually only – ‘only’ – £4.2 billion”. But two years before this assertion the National Audit Office put the cost at £9.3bn. Above is a screenshot of a part of an NAO report on the Emergency Services Network that confirms the cost.

The minister’s statement, therefore, suggested to MPs that £9.3bn figure was a myth. In fact the National Audit Office and the minister’s officials were giving the projected costs over different time periods.

But how were MPs who questioned the scheme’s costs in Parliament to know this?  

(More on the Emergency Services Network is in the last post in this series.)

World-beating track and trace system

The prime minister told MPs a “world-beating” Covid track and trace system would be ready by 1 June 2020 but his statement had little to do with reality. 

No world-beating track and trace system was ready by 1 June. Or even a working one. Contract tracers struggled to log onto the system and had error messages they didn’t understand and nobody explained. When they were able to log in, there was nobody to trace, according to BBC’s Panorama.

A centralised database for a contract tracing app was fatally flawed, unnecessarily complicated and phones failed to communicate via bluetooth. Multi-million pound IT contracts came to nothing.  But when ministers updated Parliament, their statements turned truth on its head.  A minister, when asked about the track and trace app, told Parliament on 18 June 2020 of “terrific progress”. He also spoke of the track and trace programme as a “remarkable national asset that protects us from the virus …”

But Reuters reported in June 2020 …

Sky News told a similar story:

The whole truth?

When ministers assure Parliament of progress on a big IT project in their department, they may not know the whole truth. In Parliament, they sometimes read out statements drafted by their civil servants word for word. 

Former Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude told the Financial Times,

“There were a lot of failures in DWP [Department for Work and Pensions] and it isn’t good that it took a review commissioned . . . by the secretary of state to disclose what was going on…

“You’ll find a lot of ministers don’t know a lot of things going on in the department because there’s no way you’ll find out.”

A general lack of openness and transparency is not helped by a government-wide ban on central departments publishing internal reports on the progress or otherwise of IT-based projects. This thin-skinned approach is summed up by the then Justice minister who told Parliament in 2019 that his ministry would not publish the results of a review into what had been described as an IT meltdown in the courts.

The meltdown happened  in 2019 when multiple Ministry of Justice IT systems failed at one time. Trials were delayed, jurors were unable to enrol and lawyers were prevented from confirming attendance that enabled them to get paid.

But the minister said the review report would not be made public in order to “protect the department’s security and commercial interests”.

Bob Neill MP, then chairman of the Commons justice select committee, was concerned about what he saw as unnecessary secrecy. He said,

“This [refusal to publish] is a troubling decision which could set a dangerous precedent. “Commercial confidentiality” should not be a used as a blanket reason for withholding information from proper scrutiny, and if there are legitimate security concerns, there are well-established precedents for publishing reports in a redacted form. The government should consider doing that in this case.”

But the justice minister used a familiar Whitehall technique for responding publicly to IT failures: he told Parliament what was not the case rather than what was: his Parliamentary reply said there was no evidence of foul play and no data was lost during the incident – although nobody had suggested either of these things had happened.

Indeed, the government kept its review report into the courts IT meltdown secret. This meant there was little or no incentive for the department to avoid IT-related chaos again and the wider public sector was denied an opportunity to learn from what happened.     

Part 3 –  “Whitehall’s alternative reality” to follow

Part 1 – 43 years of state IT project disasters – and they’re still happening – Campaign4change

Troubling secrecy after IT meltdown in the courts – Law Society Gazette

Track and Trace – BBC Panorama

The Great Post Office Scandal – Nick Wallis’ book

Post Office received £1bn subsidy as part of IT scandal compensation – Karl Flinders, Computer Weekly

Barrister Paul Marshall on the Post Office scandal – the intersection of law, ethics and politics

Among the systemic causes of around £40bn of state IT-related failures are truth decay, excessive secrecy, no consequences for getting it wrong and the misleading of Parliament – a decades-old “conceal-and-deny” approach.

A public inquiry into the Post Office IT scandal is looking at the Horizon system alone – not the Whitehall culture that makes central government, with some notable exceptions, a dysfunctional buyer of IT.

Part 1 of a multi-part series of posts

By Tony Collins

Campaign4Change has compiled a list of major IT projects that have contributed to around £40bn worth of government IT-related failures since the 1970s. One current project in trouble is costing £9.3bn.

Below is a summary of 13 projects where, when things went seriously wrong, Whitehall officials or government ministers did not tell Parliament the whole truth and sometimes nothing like the whole truth.  

1) The cost of a project to computerise magistrates courts involving ICL [Fujitsu] and a predecessor of the Ministry of Justice nearly trebled from £146m to £447m and did not work properly years after the roll-out;

2) The Rural Payments agency’s Single Payment Scheme cost around £350m – four times its original estimate of £75.8m – and had to be replaced. Its £155m successor system led to farmers making subsidy claims on paper;

3) A £475m IT system for a purpose-built air traffic control centre in Swanwick, Hampshire was due to go live in 1996 but was delayed by six years while costs increased by £180m; 

4) Costs almost trebled on a prisons IT system [National Offender Management Information System] known as C-NOMIS from £234m to £690m and even then the National Audit Office described the system as “ultimately unsuccessful”;

5) The House of Commons was told the Ministry of Defence’s Defence Information Infrastructure would cost £2.3bn. It turned out to be £7.09bn, while there were long delays rolling it out and civil servants described parts of the system as an unmitigated disaster;

6) A £9.3bn communications system for police, ambulance and fire services, the Emergency Services Network,  is currently running seven years late, is £3.1bn over budget [49%] and may never work as originally intended;

7) Whitehall’s “ FireControl” project to replace the 46 Fire and Rescue Services’ local control rooms across England with nine purpose-built regional control centres linked by a new IT system ended in failure, with £469m and seven years of work wasted while costs to maintain empty control centres continued to burden taxpayers;

8) The government-owned Post Office spent £600m on a flawed computer system, Horizon, whose defects led to hundreds of sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses losing their homes, businesses and, in a few cases, their lives, while more than 700 miscarriages of justice have left taxpayers facing a £1bn compensation bill, a potential debt that leaves the Post Office technically insolvent;

9) An earlier £1bn government-funded “Pathway” computer scheme to pay benefits via a card, a project that involved social security officials, the Post Office and supplier ICL [Fujitsu], was ended after delays, a series of disagreements and an exchange of breach-of-contract notices;

10) The National Audit Office found that a new system at passport offices forced at least 500 people to cancel their holidays because passports could not be issued on time;

11) Public Accounts Committee MPs found that the Home Office continues to struggle with IT, at a “staggering” cost to the taxpayer. Its failed e-borders project cost £340m plus £185m for a legal case against supplier Raytheon in the wake of the contract’s cancellation, plus a further £173m on a delayed successor scheme. The Home Office had given “false assurances” to Parliament, had failed to be open and transparent and had continued its “miserable record of exorbitantly expensive digital programmes that fail to deliver for the taxpayer,” said the committee in 2021.

 12) In the 1990s a predecessor of the Department for Work and Pensions set a then-record for overspent IT projects when a technology scheme that Parliament was told would cost about £700m in fact cost £2.6bn. At the outset, the director of the “Operational Strategy” IT project, when asked by MPs if the £700m costs would rise in real terms, replied that equipment costs would, if anything, “come down”.    

13) In perhaps the biggest state IT failure to date, the Department of Health lost up to £10bn on the National Programme for IT in the NHS [NPfIT], which was “dismantled” in 2011, eight years after critics had said it could never work and after Parliament was repeatedly assured that it was making good progress. Added to the wasted billions was a reportedly huge payment to Fujitsu, one of the NPfIT suppliers. After its contract was terminated, Fujitsu sued the government for £700m. A settlement was reached in secret.

Consistent underperformance

 In 2021, the National Audit Office reported that, despite 25 years of government strategies and countless attempts to deliver digital business change successfully, there has been a “consistent pattern of underperformance”.

The NAO highlighted repeated causes of failure such as lack of digital expertise among decision makers.

But its cross-government report last year, “The challenges in implementing digital change”, failed to mention the systemic cultural causes of decades of IT project failures. Below are some of these underlying causes:  

– In Whitehall, project failures have no bottom-line consequences. No individual need be concerned.

– Senior officials and ministers don’t have to be available on big IT contracts to make awkward decisions.

– Leaders keep changing including senior responsible owners, senior officials and ministers

– Responsibility for failure is nebulously collective and individual responsibility is, in practice, non-existent, which is not the way to run a big IT project.

– For some suppliers, there may be a huge gap between those bidding for contracts, whose promises are sometimes abundant and extravagant, and those who have to deliver.

– A “keep-it-simple” philosophy in Whitehall is rare. Hundreds and sometimes thousands of change requests are routine. Big IT programmes are often characterised by their gold-plated complexity even when simplifying business processes to suit a proven IT system is more likely to lead to success.  

– when things go badly wrong, a top priority of senior officials, it appears, is to protect their minister and omit inconvenient facts from draft Parliamentary replies, speeches and government statements.

– No matter how poor the performance of big IT companies,  ministers and Whitehall’s senior officials will not let a dispute with one of their major technology suppliers reach an open courtroom for fear of civil servants being put on the stand where they could reveal, under cross examination, how dysfunctional parts of government can be.

Truth?

Suppliers may, however, sue their public sector customers which EDS [later HP] did in 2000. During cross-examination in court, an official said Parliament was not told the whole truth about progress on a £50m project for a new air traffic control system in Scotland.

He said the House of Commons’ Transport Committee was told that, although the project’s timetable had slipped, for reasons unrelated to the contract, EDS was performing well. But MPs were not told that, a week before the committee hearing, a different supplier, Raytheon, had been asked about the possibility of taking over the EDS contract. 

The official was asked in court whether he had reported his concerns over the truth of evidence given to the transport committee. He replied that MPs were given information based on “other factors”. He said it was not his job to go and correct what the committee was or wasn’t told.

Part 2 – Slippery with the truth – follows on Monday