Jan 11, 2024
Post Office paid Fujitsu £95m to extend Horizon
The Post Office has paid Fujitsu over £95m to extend the troubled Horizon IT system for two years after a plan to move to Amazon had to be abandoned. When Fujitsu won the contract to install computer terminals in over 17,000 Post Office branches around the UK, it called it "The biggest non-military IT project in Europe", designed to automate and simplify everything from selling stamps to paying pensions. A Post Office spokesperson said: "The age of Horizon and the complexity involved meant that particular programme proved too technically challenging and costly. A decision was taken in November 2022 to discontinue this particular programme and resulted in a need to extend support services for our current data centres." The Horizon contract was meant to expire in 2023 but the challenges of replacing it have been so great that it has been extended twice - for £42.5m in 2021, and again last year in two contracts worth £16.5m and £36.6m. These take the contract up to 1 April 2025, at a total cost of £95.6m. The Post Office justified the £16m contract extension because a "Program to transfer the services to a new cloud provider created fundamental technical challenges that POL could not economically and technically overcome." The Post Office is still working on a replacement for Horizon, dubbed "New Branch IT". The first installations were meant to happen last year, but it is behind schedule.
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