Fujitsu should be paying compensation to sub-postmasters wrongly convicted for theft, says Sally Stringer one of the victims of the Post Office scandal.
She is angry the Japanese-owned company, which developed the software at the heart of the affair, is still winning government contracts 20 years after the problems first arose. Fujitsu said it was sorry for its role in sub-postmasters' suffering.
But there is a growing chorus calling for action over the firm's role.
No-one from Fujitsu has been held to account for failures with Horizon, the software it supplied to the Post Office. The firm has not paid any compensation to victims and has continued to win government contracts for its IT services worth billions of pounds.
The public inquiry into the scandal is still waiting to hear from Gareth Jenkins, Fujitsu's former chief IT architect. His court testimony was central to convictions of many sub-postmasters and used repeatedly by Post Office lawyers in court cases to say that the Fujitsu IT system was working correctly.
Mr Jenkins has twice asked for immunity from prosecution before giving evidence, but the judge chairing the inquiry has turned down the requests. On Tuesday the prime minister announced the government would bring in a new law to “swiftly exonerate and compensate victims”.
Ms Stringer, along with hundreds of other sub-postmasters, was accused of taking money from the till at the Post Office she ran, after Horizon indicated there was a cash shortfall. She had to pay back £50,000 out of her own pocket.
Speaking on BBC television she challenged Post Office minister Kevin Hollinrake over the issue. “I believe that [Fujitsu] should be held responsible for some of the compensation… I mean Horizon is faulty,” she said.
Ms Stringer's calls for swifter action have been echoed by senior politicians including Liam Byrne, chair of parliament's Business and Trade Committee, which has asked the firm's executives to appear before it next week.
“When a firm has been heavily involved in a system that's shared information that put innocent people behind bars, then it's only rational that there is a moral obligation to contribute to compensation,” he said. But the government has said it will not pre-empt the findings of the public inquiry into the scandal.
Mr Hollinrake said the government's position was to wait for the inquiry to conclude “and then we impose sanctions on those that are responsible, be it a prosecution, or asking people to contribute to the tax payers' bill for compensation”.
He agreed that the taxpayer should not be left to “pick up the tab for the compensation that we're paying the postmasters” he told BBC Breakfast on Wednesday.
Questions are also being asked over why the firm has continued to win government contracts, despite a High Court judge ruling in 2019 that Horizon contained “bugs, errors and defects” and that there was a “material risk” shortfalls in branch accounts were caused by the system.
Over the past four years Fujitsu has won 101 contracts worth £2bn including £36m for an extension to the contract for Horizon, according to according to the procurement analysts Tussell The government has removed Fujitsu from its list of preferred suppliers, but the firm is still able to win contracts through the normal procurement process.
In fact Fujitsu's products are so deeply entrenched in the government's IT infrastructure, it may be near impossible to remove them, according to IT journalist Tony Collins, who has covered the industry for decades.
“If Fujitsu pulled the plug on the Post Office, which you wouldn't do, post offices would cease to function. Government cannot do without Fujitsu.”
The firm supplies large IT systems to the tax authority, HMRC, the Department for Work and Pensions and other parts of government, Mr Collins explained. However, Fujitsu may decide to offer compensation to victims of the scandal without being required to by the government, Mr Collins suggested.
“I would imagine Fujitsu may seriously consider donating. Government hates suing big IT suppliers because it means going into an open courtroom and revealing things about government schemes that might be highly dysfunctional” he said.
As well as appearing at the parliamentary committee, Fujitsu executives will also face questioning next week at the independent public inquiry looking into the scandal.
The government has indicated that the outcome of the inquiry could influence future contracts with Fujitsu. Fujitsu said it was fully committed to supporting the inquiry to learn from the events stretching back two decades.
“The inquiry has reinforced the devastating impact on postmasters' lives and that of their families, and Fujitsu has apologised for its role in their suffering,” the firm said. The inquiry has been under way since 2021 but the scandal hit the headlines after ITV aired a dramatisation of the events last week.
It told the story of how more than 700 branch managers were convicted of false accounting, theft and fraud based on faulty software, over 15 years. More than 100 new potential victims of the scandal have since come forward, prompted by the programme and subsequent coverage.
— CutC by bbc.com
