Post Office and Fujitsu execs 'should have known' Horizon IT system was flawed Senior Post Office staff in the UK – and those working for suppliers Fujitsu and ICL – knew or should have known about the defects causing errors in the Horizon system that contributed to the wrongful prosecution of hundreds of branch workers, 13 of whom committed suicide, most probably as a result, according to the first volume …
Where there ever any criminal convictions due the criminal collusion of post office and Fujitsu staff to the causing several suicides? (I can't seem to find any that have in a cursory search)
Its not even skating by as negligence if they knew about it and ignored it and/or tried to hide it.
A lot of people should be going to prison for a long time over this to try and right the deliberate wrongs that they committed.
I'm sure many of you have been involved in large technical projects; there are no secrets when things are buggy, word gets around on the teams supporting and working on them.
Compensation may help those who are still alive, but so many years have been lost by the postmasters and their families due to this attempted cover up.
I absolutely and without reserve wholly support your position.
I want every responsible attached to this fiasco put in jail, have their medals and honors entirely rescinded and pay personally a fine (of importance, not £250) to make the entire cadre of so-called "elites" realize that they are responsible, not just there to get a big paycheck.
"Only the French have ever come up with an effective solution."
Not really, remember the revolution was caused by Louis trying to tax the nobility to in order to fix the massively underfunded and nonfunctional government institutes. So the nobility got the peasants to do their dirty work, and in the end the nobility had even more money and power.
"This is public-sector arse-covering, not private-sector greed"
Nope. Fujshitsu is a private sector company. So is the Post Office. It was government owned for most of the Horizon shit-show and was being lined up for privatisation at that time. This lead to greedy and incompetent private sector bell-ends running the business. They ignored Horizon complaints because it would affect the juicy bonuses and share options they'd get when the Post Office was privatised.
There is some public-sector arse-covering going on though: the ministers like Ed Davey and the senior civil servants who were responsible for appointing Vennels and the rest of Satan's little helpers.
The Post Office is state owned, it's a private limited company with one shareholder, the Government of the United Kingdom, and has been since 1987 through to the present day. It's never been private sector owned in that time.
Here's the companies house page for details.
this is england... they won't. hillsborough, the blood scandal, grenfell, the numerous NHS scandals & a host of others over the years including things like the guildford 4 etc. there will be a slap on the wrist , comments of "lessons learnt & make sure it never happens again" & everyone will carry on as normal because they know the public don't have the mental capacity to do anything other than wave little plastic flags for the rich & connected.
Fred the Shred, who collapsed RBS through his fuckery is still getting his £600,000 pension & playing golf in scotland while the rest of us are STILL dealing with the fall out.
It feels as though there needs to be a way for accountability to follow senior people when they leave a job - too often in these situations we see organisations punished while the people who made the decisions at those organisations have long-since moved on to highly paid roles elsewhere and any reputational damage they may suffer is entirely countered by the immense financial cushions they are resting on. I don't know whether that exists now - perhaps a more zealous approach to prosecutions under existing laws would help - but it would feel fairer if these decisions had clear consequences for the people who made them, as well as their victims.
The answer is jail for those at the top. Too often those at the top are insulated from what is really just. I saw a PBS(US person here) that was covering the atrocities of the concentration camps, and they were interviewing a woman who was a docent at a memorial museum. She was quite old, 90's and had been in a camp. They asked her about the guards etc and she said something I thought very insightful. Humans can be the most monstrous animals on the planet, they just need to be given permission. The guards at the camps were given permission by the government to do those things, just like the top tier at the post office gave permission to prosecute those postmasters who they knew had done nothing wrong. And yet they did it. Permission. Here in the US you are seeing it with insurance claims. The adjusters are being given permission to deny valid claims, for profit. And they know it is wrong. A few brave ones act as whistleblowers and get fired. I thought the same happened with the Post scandal, a few came forward and were ground up.
The guards at the camps were given permission by the government to do those things, just like the top tier at the post office gave permission to prosecute those postmasters who they knew had done nothing wrong.
The Nuremberg trials rejected following orders as a defence. OK: this was a trial after a war, but the same principle should apply elsewhere, including the Horizon IT scandal.
The problem is what are you personally prepared to sacrifice for honesty and integrity?
If the price of speaking out against 'management' failures is being personally vilified, dismissed from your job, and sinking into poverty and squalor with your children and spouse and losing your home, would you? The experiences of 'whistleblowers' in the UK is not exactly to be envied. After all the people who knew there were problems with Horizon got exactly that treatment.
Fortunately I was never in the position where I had to choose.
The real issue is that management ought to have known what was going on, and their (Vennals et at) defence seems to have been personal incompetence. IMHO* it is not merely the Post Office senior management who should be prosecuted, but the people who appointed them. I expect to board the porcine flight to Shangri-La long before that happens.
*'Humble', moi?
The first thing I want to see from the enquiry is full and prompt compensation for the people who were wrongly convicted. This compensation should have be paid a long time ago. Any further delays are not reasonable.
The second thing is a list of people who will be prosecuted for perjury and imprisoned on conviction.
Nothing else is acceptable.
This.is why the Tory MP I the previous government said a very important thing: the compensation had to be fair to the taxpayer. Ie. He didn’t care about the victims, his only concern was to minimise the spend of his department whilst he was Minister.
Personally, I would have given everyone charged by the PO, a no strings attached £1m initial payout, years back (and put an indexed charge against all PO executives assets/estates equal to their total pay and bonuses received).
Given the Post Masters and their families have been largely stripped of everything, they are likely to be high on the list of those needing enhanced benefits and so are likely to actually cost the government more; just these costs will be lost in other department’s expenditure…
Don't get me wrong, the victims of this appalling disaster deserve full, fair and immediate compensation, it is just that claiming it will not have an effect is incorrect. Personally I would suggest taxing the rich, but that is a whole can of worms, and the rich are the ones who can afford clever accountants to hide 'their' wealth from inconvenient tax gatherers who just want them to pay appropriately to support the society that has allowed their accumulation of extraordinary wealth. Sadly these things are never easy.
a billion is peanuts to fushitsu. the whole system is broken!
give em a million each & then chase not only fujitsu but the management. force them to sell their homes! bankrupt them as a lesson to others!
Crapita are the reason that birmingham is so fucked, yet the media blame the women workers for having the temerity to ask for fair back pay! it was Craputa that promised £1 billion of savings, didn't deliver, refused to kill the contract by lawering up & actually COSTING £1 billion to the authority & STILL they're throwing money at Oracle to fix it all. and yet STILL these firms are allowed to bid on contracts!!
there should be a rule... fuck up.. no public sector contracts for 10 years. automatically AND pay back all the costs of the initial contract. i'm tired of my tax money being used by these shysters repeatedly winning work & fucking it
fujitsu, captia, accenture, pwc, kpmg, mckinsey, bcg, dxc, cap gemini,atos wipro, infosys, tata etc. ALL of them fucking the tax payer, allowed to get away with literal murder. taking tax payer cash, shipping jobs offshore, profits offshre & then whining like like kids when it goes wrong. NONE of these firms should exist in the uk today!
and i'm tired of ppl trying to excuse their fuckery with "well the customer never said what they wanted" or "the customer kept changing their minds"..... sorry that's YOUR job. if you can't say no to s customer or can't get basic requirements from them, you shouldn't be in the business!
Well the latest reports are that over 1000 people may have been prosecuted or threatened, so that would be a billion, so it would actually register, sorry.
It would register, but it's well into slush-fund money. UKGov has an annual spend of ~£1.2Tn - or £1,200Bn. They can easily find £1Bn for something like this.
Prior to the last GE, we got to watch the Tories insist that their Rwanda scheme1 was going happen, and then piss £400m up the wall not making it happen. That £400m was not budgeted, it was not funded. The Home Office just spent it, with the Treasury issuing the necessary gilts to make it happen. Because actually, you can print money and the BoE, ECB, BoJ and Federal Reserve do it all the time. As long as the amount you're printing is some small fraction of 1% of your overall spend, the markets don't care - so long as you're spending it on something worthwhile like infrastructure. Compensation is a bit iffy, but it's a one-off and the markets will be happy to see that money circulate into consumer spending.
A billion pounds is a great sum of money to you or I, and it's a noticeable sum to the government - but ultimately not a consequential one.
Google have just announced they're burning $75Bn2 on AI over the next few years. A billion is just not a significant number in multi-national or governmental accounting.
It is remarkable for instance how the government insists that it's very difficult to fund public transport. Yet there are many towns who would say "well, we could have put that Rwanda money to better use. £400m would have been transformative in Stoke-on-Trent, Bradford, Coventry or Bristol - and driven this growth they keep bleating on about.
1. Whatever your position on immigration may be, Rwanda was a circus show - and more fool those who fell for it. The Rwanda policy broke various laws - which the Home Secretary knew because they have in-house barristers who advised them it was so. Being a government with a working majority, they could have passed legislation to support their policy. Instead, they allowed themselves to be taken to court and lose, so that they could berate the judicial system in the press and paint judges as "enemies of the people" simply for... upholding the law (that was passed by a democratically-elected and sovereign Parliament) and not allowing the Government to simply make it up as they went along. It was just part of the culture wars, driven by unserious people. It was not a real policy to address any real issue. It was an extension of the Article 50 play where they knew full-well that Art.50 required an Act of Parliament (which Bloody Stupid Johnson easily passed with his big majority in record time), but the Government chose to waste the time of the Supreme Court pretending that BSJ had some sort of presidential executive mandate to do whatever the fuck he wanted.
2. I'm intrigued to know whether you'd get more environmental damage from building and powering $75Bn worth of AI datacenters, or by simply piling up 75Bn $1 bills and setting light to them. Certainly more particulate matter from the latter. But you wouldn't have to produce steel, concrete or all the REMs in the chips.
£1B is about 0.2% of the government's annual spend. Even though that's a fairly big number, it's unlikely to be big enough to register.
If we had a competent government (I know, I know) much of that £1B could and should be recovered from the bastards responsible for the scandal.
Blanket payments of £1M to each of the victims would also work out a lot cheaper than paying for 1000+ court cases and thousands of ambulance-chasing lawyers with their snouts in the trough charging £1000+/hour.
The budget last October said that £1.8bn has been allocated to Horizon compensation schemes, of which £1bn has already been paid out to 7,300 former postmasters etc. I guess Fujitsu will be asked to come up with some of that - even if they're not contractually liable?
Agreed. None of the Fujitsu or PO execs are going to serve any time and anybody that thinks they will is deluded.
PC Plod has already said that potential criminal proceedings won't start until 2028 at the earliest (given the glacial rate of judicial workings, 2030 is more likely but even that's optimistic). Given that Grenfell has not and will not result in any criminal proceedings it's extremely unlikely that Horizon will differ. By the time we get to 2030 Joe Public will have forgotten about it as they'll be more interested in the latest celebrity drivel "Brooklyn Beckham is dating Kim Kardashian's robot clone".
Ultimately the sociopaths responsible for the whole farrago are only interested in status and money so a) taking back their gongs and b) fining them as a group of individuals the exact amount of compensation given to the sub-postmasters would seem reasonable and wouldn't necessarily require criminal proceedings which are largely for the benefit of the lawyers and judges. Won't make any difference to future egregiousness on the part of this class of individual as (like most criminals) they think they'll get away with it.
"They could give every one of those poor postmasters a million pounds and it would barely register on the governments accounts."
The amount of time and effort being put into assessing and paying compensation seems to be creating delays that are themselves, gross injustices, on top of the original literal injustices. I think a lesson to be learned is the need sometimes to do something roughly right but do it quick. While time ticked by, some of the affected have died.
From the Wikipedia page on the scandal:
"In March 2023, the Law Society Gazette wrote, "Journalist Nick Wallis, who wrote The Great Post Office Scandal, tweeted today that 27 claimants who would have qualified for the group litigation scheme have died waiting for compensation. ... In January 2024, postal affairs minister Kevin Hollinrake told the Commons the families of the 60 people who died before receiving any compensation will be able to apply for compensation in their place"
"The amount of time and effort being put into assessing and paying compensation"
Just noticed, in an almost sick parody of the horizon scandal, the infected blood scandal is delivering the same sort of double whammy, according to https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd78zgj0wwdo
"Thousands of victims of the infected blood scandal are being 'harmed further' by long waits for compensation, the chair of the public inquiry into the disaster has said."
It's almost as if the "powers that be" don't give a damn about anybody other than themselves and just want us all to die (preferably horribly, but quietly) somewhere else but that they like to put on a show for their retired judge friends to have one last sup on the gravy train at a pointless yet mind-bogglingly expensive public inquiry.
Evidence for the prosecution: Hillsborough (repeatedly), Bloody Sunday (repeatedly), Grenfell, infected blood, Rochdale child abusers, Horizon...
literally just saw a video of an ex high court judge arguing on the news that the rich should be able to pay a fine to avoid jail as a "yellow card" to help reduce the queues in the court systems. even the interviewer, can't tell if it was bbc or sky, pulled him up on that fuckery.
and THEN they wonder why the youf don't care anymore. if you know the system is built against you and theyre not even TRYING to bribe you with the ability to buy a house ir get a good job as regardless of how hard you work or study, your job will be offshored... why wouldn't you just turn to crime or burn down a shop?
Probably worth a couple of minutes to read this: https://www.postofficescandal.uk/post/prof-moorhead-crass-does-not-come-close/
How can it take more than six months to go through what was said in court?
Because what was said in the inquiry sessions—the verbal evidence—is a small fraction of the evidence being considered. There are over 250,000 documents (over 2 million pages) as well. (See background and statistics about the Inquiry (PDF).)
Did you actually listen to the hearings? I'm retired and I did. If Sir Win can get out a fair and equitable report by next year I shall be most impressed. Remeber that whilst many of these people have been, and probably correctily damned in the the general view it is a principle of law that they are allowed to defend themselves. (Well, they were "assisting" the enquiry, even when they had been subpoenad. "Thank you for helping us today" with no mention it was being done with a gun at their head. Contenpt of court allows Sir Win to send them to the clinc without a jury trial.
There are only two major things that concern me re justice.
1) The police have already indicated that they have in excess of 30 persons of interest but cannot procede with their investigations until the enquiry reports.
2) Paula Vennels has a potential case of contempt of parliament outstanding as she knowingly and deliberately lied to the select commitee investigating the scandal. Until Parliament acts on this or waives its priviledge then it has a prior claim on her, and no prosecution can be brought agaist her (IANAL and this is simply my understanding of this).
The Post Office, like the RSPCA etc (& in fact any private individual) can investigate and bring prosecutions in England & Wales - although they stopped doing so in 2015. In Scotland they always had to pass cases to the Procurator Fiscal - but despite this there were miscarriages of justice there too. In England & Wales the police used to be able investigate & bring prosecutions themselves - but it was recognised that this was unfair & since 1986 they have to pass cases to the Crown Prosecution Service.
WTF? Do you seriously think this clusterfuck and the scum responsible for it ever had a change log?
In one of Paula Vennels' show trials, the defendant's lawyers asked for a copy of Horizon's bug list. The Post Office refused saying it would cost too much to produce this. The judge agreed. That meant the innocent subpostmaster was found guilty and sentenced to jail.
This is one of Horizon's most blatant examples of a conspiracy to pervert the course of justice. Nobody's been charged for that yet, let alone prosecuted and jailed. All the inquiries, judicial reviews and reports won't make the slightest difference. The British/Oxbridge Establishment always looks after its own.
change log? they LITERALLY setup a helpdesk for horizon who were told not to accept there were issues. there's plenty of reports from engineers on the ground saying they'd known it was faulty and dialling into terminals to fix the numbers.
ALL of this was known. ALL of this was arse covering by fujitsu & the post office management. ALL of them should be in jail & have their assets confiscated & sold to add to the compensation fund
before any criminal charges will be pressed, followed by another 18 months for the defense to put together a case, and to book court time.. another 6 months, followed by 'not guilty' pleas and another 6 month delay
But of course we'll know where all the blame points to.
To Roger Lloyd, creator and maintainer of the opensource module 'TSP- 56K' written to interface TCP stacks with 56K modems with one crucial bug in it, and copied line for line by fushitshow.
Mr Lloyd will then be jailed for 37 years for causing the post office scandle while all senior managers at fushitshow/post office walk free because they clearly didn't know what the fuck they were doing and relying on Mr Lloyd to produce bug free code.
Well.. it sounds about right. doesn't it?
Some documentation please:
Who is this Roger Lloyd, what was his job title and what did he do? He certainly wasn't mentioned in the HORIZON fault analysis report that appeared a few years back when the doubts about HORIZON and its management first became public knowledge.
Similarly, who at the Post Office owned the HORIZON project?, i.e. who was the individual or group who specified, agreed, and (should have) gotten its requirements documentation signed off before any coding was started and should have remained responsible it until it had successfully passed all system tests INCLUDING a set of WELL DEFINED END-USER ACCEPTANCE tests prior to it being formally accepted as fit for live operation?
I'd just remind you that by 1990 this was a well-understood system development process. I, and many others, were already using this approach in 1976 for chrissake, so there was really no excuse at all for anybody putting a complex system live without fully testing it first.
> Who is this Roger Lloyd, what was his job title and what did he do?
I suspect he is the convenient lower level scapegoat who will do the time in lieu of the higher-ups, much in the same way as Lieutenant William Calley took the fall for Captain Medina and the rest of the chain of command for the My Lai massacre1 and PFC Lynndie England took the fall for the Abu Ghraib atrociousness while her chain of command, up to and including the Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, and President George W Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney, skated.2
History is replete with such.
_____________
There were a lot of problems with the Escher "Riposte" comms software - which dropped & duplicated transactions from Day 1. That, and the pressure to get off paperwork, the descoping of pensions from the system (which killed the business case), the imposition of a PFI contract (which denied access to source code & developers), the splitting of PO & Royal Mail etc etc put the whole project into a perilous position.
Those looking to assign blame might be curious to know that the cause of all the false convictions was due to "legacy horizon". So what was different?
"Legacy Horizon" was the project no one wanted to bid for; the post office didn't want, the benefits agency didn't want, and subpostmasters didn't want. ICL bid with the Escher vendor for the Irish Poost Office system because it wanted the Benefits integration part (ditched before national Rollout). The cash-account report (that is the cause of all the accounting errors) was not even in the original brief, and was added after contact award.
Given the about, why the hell was it implemented? It initially went live in 1996 and was a a stunning success for those it was commissioned to save: Tory MP's at electoral risk from votes upset that the last shop in the village might close. Post 1997, the new Labour government tried to kill it, but post-office and Fujitsu management strongly asserted it worked flawlessly.
Legacy Horison used ISDN dial-up networking with UDP messaging, but could reach rural villages when Amazon was just a river. If you don't think £billions and numerous lives justify saving the seats of a handful of MPs, maybe you should look to Francis Maude - the genius responsible
It is painfully obvious that the Post Office - by which I mean its senior management - still believes that the sub postmasters were guilty and that they have been let off on a technically. That thick thug of an investigator who testified at the enquiry said basically the same thing.
And so I repeat the call I have made before. Dismiss all the senior management without compensation (another act of parliament if necessary) and hand the entire organisation over to the sub postmasters collectively to be run as a member owned cooperative from now on. The current company is too corrupt and too tainted by ruined lives and suicides to be allowed to continue.
I disagree, I think the senior management at the Post Office have known for a very long time, that they were prosecuting the sub-postmasters for errors produced by the Horizon system.
I believe they continued to prosecute people they knew to be innocent, because otherwise they'd have had to admit publicly that they'd previously made a mistake.
That would have lead to all sorts of appeals and compensation, but if those senior execs could keep kicking the can down the road, then they'd be able to retire with a big fat bonus, and CBE's all round, so that's what they did.
Don't believe all the stories you've heard...
Countless cases where the Crown have hurt the public, where countless inquiries point to the Crown as the problem, and countless cases where the Crown goes out of their way to make sure every person wronged is dead or near dead before giving them the justice they deserved.
Everyone banging on about jail time, no. At what point do we say enough to this shit and cut the problem out altogether? It's only at that point can justice be given to those who need it.
"In each, or at least most of those cases, they relied upon data from Horizon to prove that losses had actually occurred," the report says. "In each such case brought against an accused within the United Kingdom, the Post Office and/or the prosecuting authorities asserted either expressly, or by implication that the data produced by Horizon was wholly reliable."
In 1999 the Law Commission made a proposal that changed the rules of evidence regarding computer records. They would be presumed accurate unless shown otherwise. From 1984 until 1999, the presumption went the other way. Now the burden is on the defendant to show that the records are inaccurate. Those of us with the slightest IT experience understand that this can be practically impossible. And so it was here. The fault is with Post Office and Fujitsu for insisting that the system was robust in its error handling and for failing to disclose evidence to the contrary, but ultimately it's a failure of the criminal justice system and its rules of evidence in the modern age.
"ultimately it's a failure of the criminal justice system and its rules of evidence in the modern age."
There were others. For instance, the Post Office prosecuting innocent people the PO's investigators had decided were guilty. The Post Office forced innocent subpostmasters to cop a plea for a lesser offence to avoid jail, bankruptcy and homelessness.
I am satisfied from the evidence that I have heard that a number of senior, and not so senior, employees of the Post Office knew or, at the very least, should have known that Legacy Horizon was capable of error
The reason there's never been any serious consequences is because of bullshit like "a number of ... ". Who? Which people are you referring to? This is from a judge as well ffs. Unless you are going to name specific people and prosecute them this is a piss take that will carry on for many more years.
I predict that volume will say all the incriminating paperwork has been "lost", the guilty parties "can't remember" and/or blame each other, there's not enough evidence to proceed with prosecutions, some of the accused are "too ill" to stand trial, prosecutions aren't in the public interest, etc, etc.
Even if the guilty parties have managed to burn their earlier paper trails, they surely cannot claim ignorance after the problems were made public by Computer Weekly in 2009. Prosecutions continued for 6 years after it was public knowledge that there were problems with Horizon.
Whilst bugs were known it was better to maintain a position and say nothing or down-play lest it created doubt in the trial. Such tacttics are not unheard of between (adversarial) sides in any trial. This was then re-inforced by the experts saying that the known bugs could not have created the discrepancies (conveniently side-stepping the existence of yet to be detected bugs). The logs (complete or otherwise) also did not show a system/local problem. There was no credible challenge to this - would need a expensive and time-consuming deep dive (so we are actually none the wiser). PO theft was always a risk given the nature of the transactions - many temptations and some will have genuinely happened. FJ were meant to deliver a system that could detect fraud and make it stand-up in court but did not and used contractual imprecision to get away with it (a unenforceable/unrealistic requirement in any case). It was Tax-payers money so must be stamped out and cannot take prisoners - all very laudible. POL would have been chastised for not doing so. All of this plus much more making miscarriages inevitable.
Miscarriages actually happening all the time in the justice system with many wrongfully behind bars and the guilty running free. If only we had the same expose of the CPC and the Met Police practices it would be even more shocking.
Don't ever forget either that the money these poor people tried to pay back to cover the ficticious losses went into post office coffers and directly contributed to income and therefore any bonuses of those in charge.
On top of everything else the accusers stole from the falsely accused and their families.
Sir Wyn, though always restrained as befits a Snr Judge (rtrd), is clearly not a happy bunny!
A lot of people ask why no-one in charge has been prosecuted yet.
I think the police are waiting for the 2nd Report, which if I understand correctly will name names.
Then the hammer should come down.
I think it even says it in this article that 'blame' is to be apportioned in the second report.
But the police are already investigating. As a rare organisation with independent powers of prosecution their abuse of those powers should result in them facing far stricter judgement than Joe Bloggs in the street. We can only hope that the CPS isn't pressured to use the public interest as a way to let the buggers off with it. Hopefully their friends in parliament have moved on/retired and the current lot are less chummy with the accused.
Why are people focused only on individuals who should be dealt with whilst Fujitsu are STILL winning government contracts??! I'm not saying individuals don't need to face justice (but not violence - come on people) but we can't ignore the continuing decisions to pay more and more to Fujitsu.
Do you seriously imagine that Fujitsu are any better or worse than any of the other big firms that win those sort of contracts? And if they are driven into bankruptcy - and all the innocent employees who have never been anywhere near the Post Office account never mind Horizon lose their jobs - there will be no contribution from them to the compensation schemes, which they have openly committed to, unlike any other guilty party.
The police investigation is ongoing BBC News - Post Office criminal trials may not start until 2028, says police chief - BBC News
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/crmvjppjzleo but I think a decision was taken not to charge people until the Williams inquiry has finished - otherwise anyone at risk of prosecution could refuse to answer questions about what happened.
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