Brit politicians question Fujitsu's continued role in public sector contracts British MPs and peers are questioning the government's decision to continue accepting bids for large-scale IT contracts from Fujitsu, despite the Japanese supplier's previous pledge to stop bidding. Following the widespread publicity around the Post Office Horizon scandal in January 2024, Fujitsu, which supplied the faulty …
https://www.legislation.gov.uk/ukpga/2023/54/section/30
Department/exclusion from Public contracts is what should happen to those wankers at Fujitsu.
If it’s good enough for suppliers to Grenfell it’s good enough for the Post Office, NHS and many others.
They also massively fucked up Primark EPoS over the last 6-7 years too.
Fujitsu is the incumbent supplier of the system, and has been awarded around £500 million since 2020.
For this piece of shit software
I know this nationwide EPOS ( electronic piece of shit?) software needs a lot of expensive servers and redundancy , and even some staff on duty to take support calls and correct data entry mistakes or whatever .
Maybe even some developers , testers , and some hardware - like a barcode reader or something for each post office
So a bit more involved than the MSBasic program my newsagent uses for paper rounds ....
But 100 million per year ?????
Somewhere the beancounters have lost site of the fact that this is computer software - the advantage of which , over other tangible products , is that it can be replicated infinite times and its barely any more effort to supply 10,000 people with it than 10
Maybe I'm being naive , and i realize this in industry standard - at least when selling to gov , but i find this ongoing cost for a piece of supplied software mindblowing
this is why i describe this country as a giant ponzi scheme. it doesn't matter what you do, who you kill, even if you meant to do it. if you're rich enough, you'll get away with it. the post office, grenfell, hillsborough, the blood scandal, the repeated nhs maternity scandals, the financial crash, each time pootin killed people in the uk including an mi6 agent & as long as the money keeps flowing to the right people, nothing happens & us plebs get shafted!
and THEN rich CEOs have the temerity to bitch that no one has any loyalty & that "productivity is low" or that "no one is buying houses or having kids ". and Sky reports that apparently "britain has got to get used to the idea of war on our doorstep ", while these rich fucks will holiday in Dubai for the duration.
they offshore manufacturing to china and then complain that the chinese are hacking our piwer companies. i can honestly say that if i saw a chinese army coming onshore , i wouldn't even reach into my pocket for my phone & i would carry on reading whatever book im reading.
how a swathe of CEOs & senior management aren't in jail over this & a multitude of other shite over decades is just morally insane!
And yet we have this a simple search away:
Procurement Policy Note 04/15: taking account of suppliers’ past performance
To ensure good provision of public services and value for money, suppliers with the necessary technical and professional ability should be selected to bid for contracts. One aspect of a supplier’s technical and professional ability is its reliability as demonstrated by how it performed in past contracts.
And if that's not good enough, then there's nothing stopping the government changing the law.
wierdly, there's plenty of laws to stop someone getting a minimum wage job if they once were in jail for something or that secret list the builders were working off for decades which meant men couldn't get work as they'd been blacklisted.
take £1000 from russia as a security guard.... end up in jail. take &100,000s of Pootin attached cash as "conservative friends of russia", become PM
I agree with you that their perfomance on Horizon and the possibilty of criminal action ought to be enough to exclude** them and even if not then I'd exlude them anyway, and tell them to go ahead and sue and then use discovery to f**k them.
Changing the law is a bit more complicated. We're signed up to treaties which would make this difficult because they preclude excluding bidders on large contracts other than due to the past performance. The fact that many of the other countries who are signed up to the same treaties take no bloody notice of them would not, I fear, impact the thinking of UK government lawyers desperate to be seen to play with a straight bat.
** at best, although if we're talking about using semi-legal activities on the bastards then I can think of better ones than just stopping them bidding on contracts.
Contract : something a company can fight in court, or can escape by bankruptcy. Has non-zero cost. Tends to work, given that to break it, you need to dislike the other party more than you dislike lawyers.
Pledge: Something the coloured pencil office plays with. Slightly more promising than a new years' resolution.
Law: something MPs can introduce and vote on to fix broken things, has non zero cost, when done well, long term benefit. Reminds to do right thing (tm) when other criteria overtake human values, see done well.
Questions in parliament: A way to avoid introducing laws while stating the obvious. See redundancy.
When a consulting company, a construct that only exists to justify runaway greed, pledges to stop its raison d'etre, that is a level surrealism that makes even artists blush.
Let anyone bid that wants to bid, but weight scoring criteria such that the bad grapefruit are locked out.
Maybe this is already the case, which highlights the motleyness of the other contenders?
EDIT: I see Dan 55 has posted what should be the relevant link.
I'd apply Hanlon’s Razor here before jumping to conclusions about brown envelopes. That’s not to say I haven’t seen the occasional all-expenses-paid, three-week “fact-finding mission” for an executive and their entire family or a suspicious car purchase right after a multi-million-dollar project was awarded.
But in my experience, it’s more often laziness lack of care or an absence of real ownership that leads to the most damaging decisions.
Now layer that with a team of sales and marketing professionals who know exactly where to apply pressure and how to frame a proposal that appeals to the unspoken motivations of decision-makers. Whether it’s protecting personal career risk, polishing a CV with the illusion of transformation, or outplayed in the internal politics of their own organization, the result is often the same.
When the stakes involve millions, vendors will routinely invest ten times more effort in planning and pitching the proposal than the client puts into reviewing it. And that imbalance is rarely in the client’s favor.
In a reply to a previous article, "Anonymous IT Pro" wrote:
"Yes, the Fujitsu are good at suing the government, and winning- especially the £790m it won for being kicked off the NHS contract for its own failures, but won for breach of contract. Laughable. I hope they never win another contractor, and I used to work for them
So, based on that, I'd go for "fudge it, sue"
'Sir Gavin Williamson, former defence and education secretary, this month asked Reeves whether the government has formally invited Fujitsu to rebid for the TSS and "what assessment she has made of the potential impact of awarding the contract to Fujitsu on the reputation of that service."'
Gavin Williamson asking questions regarding reputation (presumably with a straight face)?
Oh the irony!
This post has been deleted by its author
Worked for Fujitsu Services for a while 20 years ago and it's obvious to most people that they pay crap money and employ muppets, I left after about a year as I could almost phsycially feel my IQ dropping along with my skills.
I'll give F-U-Shits-On-You some credit, they ensured I will never ever again for a services company, it's so demoralising and most people are there simply 'cos they don't have the sense or the brains to work in proper IT depts in real companies.
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