Fujitsu and its no public sector bids promises... what happened to them? It's easy to miss £125 million ($166 million). It could happen to anyone. Take Paul Patterson, for example. In January 2024, the director of Fujitsu Services Ltd emailed the UK government's commercial arm to confirm the Japanese tech services provider would pause bidding for public sector work after the Post Office Horizon …
In it's own mini scandal for NI tax payers, Capita refused to participate (or deliberately delayed) in the transition process for the new contract therefore Fujitsu had no option to walk away as it was costing them significant money each money to have their contract team in place, hence mutual agreement. The story on this one is why Capita were allowed to do this and then extend their contract at an inflated price and cost to the NI tax payer. The Schools network needs a radical overhaul and can be delivered at a far better deal for the tax payer.
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None besides every limitation and caveat we can dream up, of course. F'rinstance:
* Just ask and we'll be happy to oblige
* If it's just to keep doing what we do already (like Horizon for instance)
* Or even if it's just in a "similar" line of work
* Bids already in the pipeline
Let us know if we've forgotten any.
Actually, you have to, grudgingly, give a tiny nod to Fujitsu; they promise to not voluntarily submit a bid for any public sector contracts. And they probably won’t, unless of course said public body approaches them and ‘begs’ them to bid, because, well, we don’t understand any of this, since we are completely staffed with English Literature graduates*, yes I think we do employ some people who might know ‘computers’ but thay are paid a tiny fraction of what we are, so we can't possibly trust them! So really, please, please could you bid because we don’t know what we are doing!
And Fujitsu, reluctantly, replies with, OK fine, we really don’t want to take your money but as you seem desperate, we are prepared to help you out, just this once mind, oh, and it will cost an extra 40% as you have forced us to embarrass ourselves by accepting your money!
And for anyone, thinking, but said public body could easily employ some programmers to do ‘xyz’; yesaboslutely true, but meanwhile back in the real world........**
* nothing against Eng. Lit. graduates, but really, know your strengths and weaknesses!
** Think of it like this, you employ good programmers to implement a system which will cost a tiny fraction of what Fujitsu are quoting, if it all works, great, but will you get any praise for it; but suppose it all goes ‘nipples north’? You get the blame. On the other hand you outsource to a known big IT supplier and it all goes wrong, you have a possible get out. Avoidance of blame, is the way the civil service operates.
The Post Office chose to prosecute their sub-postmasters using their own internal prosecution system and not the criminal justice system using data that Fujitsu was contractually obliged to give them. This was happening before Horizon on the previous system as well so it was a well established process known by all governments dating back in the last century and prosecutions using data from Horizon have certainly been know about by all governments in this century. This will all come out in the enquiry. As an aside, MS Excel probably the most widely used accounting software package in the planet has errors/bugs all the time going back to it's original version and you don't see everyone running to Microsoft asking for compensation for that.
why not go right back to basics?
Any set of company directors who want to hide behind the concept of "limited liability" companies in order to award themslves basically unlimited wealth must also be willing to accept they *cannot* have it both ways.
They want unlimited wealth to be acceptable, it requires them to accept unlimited liabilities. That'll sort quite a few things out right away.
It's going to have to happen once Gary's economics finally gets out and about. It's not particuarly new but it is a remarkable analysys remarkably well presented.
Blair had to shut up about "education education education" because he knew where it would lead. Democracy without a well informed electorate is not demoracy.
Starmer's time was up before he even started.
(Voteforpolicies.org is giving up their game, their existence relies on politicians and "the system" having a smidgeon of decency. It hasn't worked that way for years in the UK)
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