Post Office halts development of IT system to replace Horizon

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The Post Office has halted development of a replacement to its scandal-hit Horizon software, as it struggles to overhaul its operations in the wake of one of the UK’s biggest miscarriages of justice.

The state-owned mail group is preparing to install computer equipment across its branches. This was supposed to run on new software from next year, but will now continue to use the old Horizon software developed by Japanese group Fujitsu.

In a long-running scandal that led to a public outcry this year, more than 900 Post Office branch managers were convicted of charges including theft, fraud and false accounting between 1999 and 2015, in cases based on faulty data from Horizon.

But the Post Office confirmed to the Financial Times that its multimillion-pound in-house replacement for Horizon, referred to as the New Branch IT programme (NBIT), was now “on pause”.

The group was “looking at all the different options”, which “could be something different to NBIT”, it added.

The delays highlight the Post Office’s struggle to move on from the controversy and win back the trust of workers. A YouGov survey of 1,483 sub-postmasters published this year found that almost 70 per cent had continued to experience an unexplained financial shortfall on the Horizon system since 2020.

The Department for Business and Trade committed £103mn in funding for a Horizon replacement in late 2023. 

Richard Trinder, chair of the campaign group Voice of the Postmaster, said he was invited to test new equipment using NBIT this year. But the software “wasn’t fast enough” and was only able to process domestic mail, despite being “more intuitive than Horizon”, he added.

Hardware including new computer screens, keyboards and printers has been sitting in a warehouse awaiting the development of NBIT but will now be installed without it, according to three people familiar with the matter. 

“It’s just sitting there in a warehouse going out of date, it makes sense [to use the hardware],” said one of the people.

Despite the delays replacing Horizon, Trinder said the new printers “were a lot faster” and welcomed the decision to roll them out regardless.

“They have spent all this money on the new hardware. Our money,” he added.

“So let’s use it, instead of this clunky crap we’ve got at the moment. It’s so slow. It says ‘processing, processing, processing’ and you’re thinking: I’ve got a queue going out the door.”