Post Office IT boss calls for subpostmasters to judge him on his actions

Opening up the IT plans

Since Computer Weekly revealed the problems with Horizon and began investigating the scandal back in 2009, no Post Office IT boss has spoken directly to Computer Weekly. Comments have been via press office statements, apart from a cold call to former chief operating officer Mike Young in 2011, where he denied any problems with Horizon.

Nice said he wants this to change and plans transparency. “As a board and executive team, we have agreed we want things to be different; we have agreed we want to be open and transparent internally, with the government, the press, the public and ultimately the subpostmasters,” he said.

Off the shelf vs in-house

Nice and his team were quick to act on arrival at the Post Office, putting a pause on work being done on its planned Horizon replacement, the New Branch IT (NBIT) project.

The NBIT, a project to build an in-house software platform to replace Horizon, was running late and hugely over budget. Costs had increased by £1bn and, as revealed by Computer Weekly in May, a government report described the project as “unachievable”.

On the pause to work being carried out, Nice said: “We felt it was the right thing to do, to pause that piece of work and do a review of the approach and the solutions to see if it was still the way to go.”

Whether to continue with the in-house build or buy a platform off-the-shelf is an major debate within the Post Office, after interim chairman Nigel Railton admitted that one of the mistakes made in the NBIT project was the decision to build in-house.

Computer Weekly has since been told by a source in Post Office IT that the “writing is on the wall” for the in-house project, with an off-the-shelf alternative being sought.

But Nice said a decision has not yet been made. “This is a decision we are not taking lightly and we are working with the government on that as well. As the single shareholder funding this, they need to be comfortable,” he said.

Nice told Computer Weekly a decision will be made before the new financial year begins in April 2025. “We got permission from the government and the board to pause NBIT at the beginning of October, so have only been looking at this in anger for a few weeks,” he said, agreeing that a decision “can’t drag on”.

Nice said the Post Office IT team is currently working on a five-year strategy, and that he hopes they will have a clear picture by the start of the next financial year. “That will sweep up what we are going to do with Horizon, but also branch technology in the broader sense,” he said.

Nice, a former Mothercare and Camelot IT executive who also worked at Accenture, said: “We are a retail organisation, and retail is brutal, and we are trying to keep up with everyone else.

“We are working against Treasury spending reviews, processes and timelines as well,” he added. “So, as we decide what we want to do, we have to feed into that process to make sure we have adequate funding.”

But he said the Post Office is now working collaboratively with the government, which “hasn’t always been the way and hasn’t helped the Post Office as an organisation”.

Work won’t go to waste

Nice said in-house developments that have been running as part of the NBIT project will not be wasted whichever way the organisation decides to go.

He said the programme has been in pilot and delivering functionality for the business. “There is capability delivered out of that, that is in the subpostmasters’ world today, around things like drop and collect,” said Nice.

“But at the heart of that programme is a long-term replacement for Horizon, and that is the piece being looked at in terms of whether we are on the right track. So, it doesn’t all stop, a lot of stuff has been done and other stuff continues on the sidelines, but the big central question around what’s the future for Horizon is the one we are revisiting and reviewing right now.”

The messy divorce

Another complication is the Post Office’s reliance on Fujitsu. The Japanese IT giant has provided support for the Horizon system since its introduction a quarter of a century ago.

Nice said the Post Office cannot currently end the contract. “In an NBIT world, or any other world, we are not going to be ready to retire and move away from Fujitsu just yet,” he said. “That’s the reality of our situation.”

The Post Office has requested a four-year extension. “We have been in conversation with Fujitsu about the details of an extension for some time,” said Nice.

“The reason different timeframes have been quoted is because that conversation has bounced around over the past six months, with different options requiring different extensions,” he added.

Computer Weekly first exposed the scandal in 2009, revealing the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon accounting software, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).