We’re finally learning the horrifying truth of the Post Office/Horizon scandal : the UK is dying the death of a thousand bad contracts:

The UK Post Office Horizon scandal is one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British legal history.

More than 700 sub-postmasters were prosecuted between 1999 and 2015 – accused of theft, fraud and false accounting.

Their lives were destroyed — people lost homes, jobs, reputations, and in some cases, their freedom. All of it was based on accounting discrepancies thrown up by a faulty IT system called Horizon.

But the most shocking part? The Post Office knew it couldn’t inspect the software that generated those discrepancies. It chose to trust the company that built it — Fujitsu — even as sub-postmasters protested their innocence, insisting the system was wrong.

Why? Because it had signed a contract in 1999 that prevented it from doing anything else.

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In 1999, under pressure from the New Labour government to rapidly modernise, the Post Office struck a deal with ICL Pathway, a subsidiary of Fujitsu. The contract was worth £548 million. The goal: computerise the Post Office network. The result:

• The Post Office didn’t own the core code of the Horizon software.
• It couldn’t inspect the transaction processing engine.
• It was locked into a long-term relationship with Fujitsu.
• Any attempt to switch vendors or build a new system would be financially crippling.

Civil servants and Treasury officials explicitly warned then-Prime Minister Tony Blair [pictured] and Chancellor Gordon Brown that this was a dangerous path. But the government went ahead anyway.

“ICL are not prepared to give perpetual licences for all the IPR. This means the Post Office could find that, when the system is installed and operating, the IPR is owned by a third party… in a strong position to drive a costly settlement with the Post Office.”

— Memo to Prime Minister Tony Blair, May 1999

It was a warning not just about risk. It was a warning about dependence. And it came true.

Since 1999, the Post Office has spent more than £2.5 billion on contracts with Fujitsu, including more than £600 million in bridging and extension contracts since 2012 — when it first tried and failed to get out of the relationship.

In 2016, it even attempted to replace Horizon with an IBM system. That project collapsed at a cost of £40 million.

Why? Because without access to the intellectual property rights (IPR) of Horizon, IBM would have had to rebuild the system from scratch – at a cost of hundreds of millions more pounds.

All the while, sub-postmasters were suffering. Convicted. Bankrupted. Suicidal. Many still report ongoing discrepancies with the Horizon system.

“Fujitsu were fighting the whole time to protect their investment and their intellectual property, rather than looking after the interests of the sub-postmasters.” — Procurement expert Ian Makgill.

“They didn’t have to take those prosecutions. They didn’t have to take people to court.” — Makgill again, pointing to the Post Office’s complicity.

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This could happen to you. Depending on what you do, it might be happening already.

Horizon was a black-box IT system used to make decisions of enormous consequence.

No transparency.

No independent validation.

Just trust in a private vendor with everything to gain and nothing to lose.

Sound familiar?

Right now, the UK government is planning sweeping cuts to disability benefits. Around 1.3 million people could lose Personal Independence Payments altogether.

It’s being pitched as reform. It’s actually a gamble — one based on cost-saving spreadsheets and political optics, not long-term evidence. Ministers have been told it’s an easy win – just like Horizon.

But history tells us what happens when:

• Ministers don’t understand the systems they approve.
• Civil service expertise is hollowed out.
• Policy is outsourced to consultants and corporations.

You get millions of pounds wasted, lives ruined, and accountability denied.

How it happened: accountability denied

When the Post Office began exploring replacements for Horizon, Fujitsu made it crystal clear:

“The code is ours. You own the service because you pay for that, but you don’t pay for the code.”

The IPR trap had snapped shut. Even internal Post Office board minutes from 2013 admit the truth:

• “There is a risk that we may be unable to agree an IP license with Fujitsu on reasonable terms.”
• “Horizon, and the infrastructure on which it was built, was vulnerable.”

Yet contracts continued. Money flowed. Sub-postmasters were blamed. And the public was told nothing.

Meanwhile, Conservative governments from 2010 onward cut back civil service expertise, outsourced decision-making, and undermined public confidence in professional oversight.

Michael Gove’s infamous phrase rings out:

“I think the people of this country have had enough of experts.”

Let’s be clear: this is not just a scandal about one software contract. This is a pattern of governance failure.

The Horizon deal is shocking not just because it happened, but because it keeps happening — again and again, under governments of all stripes. There is a pattern of deals being struck in haste, complexity being ignored or waved away, and contractors being handed generous terms while civil service oversight is either absent or actively dismantled.

This isn’t hindsight talking — it’s forewarned failures repeating themselves.

We saw it again with the NHS National Programme for IT (NPfIT) — a £12 billion project to revolutionise digital records across the health service. It was described at launch as “the world’s biggest civil IT project.” It failed spectacularly. Internal warnings were ignored. Contractors clashed. Timelines slipped for years. And eventually, almost all of it was scrapped, billions wasted, with very little to show for it.

We saw it again with HS2, the high-speed rail project whose original price tag of £37.5 billion has ballooned to well over £100 billion, even as the most ambitious legs of the route have been abandoned. It became a textbook case of overpromising, constant redesigns, and political mismanagement. Despite being a national infrastructure priority, it still faces uncertain utility, enormous sunk costs, and a trail of disrupted communities.

We saw it again with Test and Trace, a programme announced with fanfare in 2020, funded to the tune of £37 billion, and described by Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee as having “no clear impact.”

What links all of these failures — Horizon included — is not just money. It’s the hollowing out of government capability, the outsourcing of responsibility, and the suppression of internal dissent. Ministers who don’t want to hear bad news. Senior civil servants who lack the tools or experience to challenge major suppliers. And a culture in which saying “this deal doesn’t work” is considered unhelpful rather than essential.

And it’s a political culture that is in such a hurry to get results that it does not stop to consider adverse consequences.

What you can do

This is not about party politics. It’s about competence, transparency, and justice. And that starts with you.

Write to Your MP

Demand that they:

• Support full compensation and exoneration for all Horizon victims.
• Push for a full review of government procurement and contract transparency.
• Oppose policies rushed through without modelling long-term effects, such as the current PIP cuts.
• Restore civil service expertise and long-term institutional memory.

Here’s a template letter to get you started:

Dear [MP Name],

I am writing to express my concern about the systemic failures revealed by the Post Office Horizon scandal and the growing number of policy decisions being made without proper scrutiny or expertise.

The government’s role in enabling and then extending the Horizon contract with Fujitsu — at the cost of innocent people’s lives and over £2.5 billion in public money — is a warning to us all. We now see similar patterns emerging again, such as with the proposed changes to Personal Independence Payments.

I urge you to:

• Demand full accountability and justice for the Horizon victims.
• Challenge all current and future policies that lack clear evidence of benefit and a robust analysis of risk.
• Fight for the restoration of civil service capacity to evaluate, challenge and properly manage public contracts.

We need a government that listens, learns, and protects its citizens. The Horizon scandal shows what happens when it doesn’t.

Yours sincerely,

[Your Name] [Your Address] [Your Email]

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Horizon should never have happened. But it did. And it will happen again — unless we force a change.

Our future is being written all the time – in bad government contracts.

And bad governance doesn’t just waste money – it destroys lives.

We must demand better — because next time, it might not be a sub-postmaster.

It might be you.

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