Post Office stops development of IT system to replace Horizon

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The Post Office has halted development of a replacement for its scandal-hit Horizon software as it struggles to overhaul its operations in the wake of one of Britain’s biggest legal scandals.

The state-owned postal group is preparing to install computer equipment across its departments. This was due 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 Horizon data.

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

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

The delays highlight the Postal Service’s struggle to move on from the controversy and regain workers’ trust. 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 £103m. in funding for a Horizon replacement in late 2023.

Richard Trinder, chairman of campaign group Voice of the Postmaster, said he was invited to test new equipment using the 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 monitors, keyboards and printers, has been in storage awaiting the development of the NBIT, but will now be installed without it, according to three people familiar with the matter.

“It’s just sitting there in a warehouse that’s outdated, it makes sense (to use the hardware),” one of the people said.

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

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

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