Tony Blair.
I don't really see how Blair announcing it makes him culpable? It doesn't sound like it was a bad idea per se.
Just that it was poorly executed and then the resulting flaws were mishandled in a deeply incompetent and possibly criminal way.
What responsibility does Blair carry for that?
If Vennells is offered up as a sacrifice, but the rest are allowed to carry on coining it in, that’s a failure.
The inquiry team seem to be making a good attempt at identifying problems although they are dealing with that specialist form of amnesia which often crops up in these sort of circumstances and the PO/Fujitsu habit of losing documents until its demonstrated they exist.
It starts again this week with some of the Fujitsu bods. Given some of the questioning to date I doubt they enjoyed Christmas.
I don’t really see how Blair announcing it makes him culpable? It doesn’t sound like it was a bad idea per se.
He pushed it through for the Post Office despite being warned it was a crock of shit and half of its proposed functionality already having been scrapped. Apparently to avoid harming supplier relationships. So just business as usual for government procurement, really.
But he's not responsible for the heartless and criminal way Horizon was used to justify the destruction of so many lives, which is the main issue here.
He pushed it through for the Post Office despite being warned it was a crock of shit and half of its proposed functionality already having been scrapped.
Can you imagine the damage caused if it had been used, as originally planned, for benefit payments?
grimepFree Member
Add it to the charge sheet….
Right wing extremist Nigel Farage/daily mail loving twitter channel.
Ive no issues with TB announcing post office plans to go digital - he was the PM at the time and PO was a public body. I'd be surprised if he didn't announce it.
However 90,000 postoffices in the roll out in 1999!!! We are at 11500 now. I think I've already said this, bug I wonder how many profitable and needed offices shut directly due to issues with horizon?
Has anybody described what exactly the Fujitsu people were actually changing in the live data ?
I got the impression that Fujitsu aren't/weren't accused of changing the live data, rather that this undermined the legal argument for sub-post masters being made entirely responsible for their own balance sheets.
Presumably this was an important argument in the absence of evidence of a specific glitch or otherwise that had caused the discrepancies?
I got the impression that Fujitsu aren’t/weren’t accused of changing the live data, rather that this undermined the legal argument for sub-post masters being made entirely responsible for their own balance sheets.
Presumably this was an important argument in the absence of evidence of a specific glitch or otherwise that had caused the discrepancies?
I dunno, danger of taking the ITV show as "evidence", but assuming they weren't making bits up the impression I got was that the system had glitches, so the IT guys would log in, fix the symptom of the bug, and presumably (because I operate under the assumption that most people believe they are doing the right thing) in most cases it went unnoticed. Then every so often someone puts the wrong number in the wrong box and it makes things worse, but the IT guy doesn't get feedback on that, it only shows up to the subpostmaster when they do their cashing up. Hence the examples of the difference doubling before their eyes, or transactions appearing twice on different terminals.
The guy who was responsible for Horizon at Fujitsu (now retired) is wanting immunity from prosecution as a condition of giving evidence to the enquiry.
I got the impression that Fujitsu aren’t/weren’t accused of changing the live data, rather that this undermined the legal argument for sub-post masters being made entirely responsible for their own balance sheets.
Fujitsu cirtainly did have access too and could change live data with no ones knowledge to any post office across the country - they could change live data logged in under a postmasters (or anyone else's) login details without the PM 's knowledge whilst the postoffice was open. They could also login over night, mess with figures and log out again. Fujitsu witnesses have stated this.
PM's at the time were told that only they had access to their own offices systems.
Could Paula Vennels also hand back the £2m+ bonus she got when she left the PO too please
I got the impression that Fujitsu aren’t/weren’t accused of changing the live data
In several cases they were accused of it.
I would assume generally they accessed it to try and fix data but even then hitting the wrong button or the classic "what do you mean I am not in dev?" makes it rather problematic.
Especially since there is no log of it.
I dunno, danger of taking the ITV show as “evidence
The Panorama episode is quite good, corroborates some of the finer tension points of this whole mess. You also hear from the two Second Site investigators who were combined as 'Bob' in the drama.
The guy who was responsible for Horizon at Fujitsu (now retired) is wanting immunity from prosecution as a condition of giving evidence to the enquiry.
Sounds about right, hopefully they decide to pass on that and when it comes around to necks on blocks he's in the queue.
Could Paula Vennels also hand back the £2m+ bonus she got when she left the PO too please
Bang on, has anyone ever put an estimated figure on the total of monies paid back by SPMs due to 'errors'?
I assume it ended up in the profits pot and was subsequently paid out to senior leaders?
He pushed it through for the Post Office despite being warned it was a crock of shit and half of its proposed functionality already having been scrapped. Apparently to avoid harming supplier relationships
People can form a queue behind me to throw rotten tomatoes at Blair, but honestly I find it difficult to believe that he personally pushed Horizon onto the Post Office simply to maintain some sort of supplier relationship with Fujitsu/ICL. I know that Horizon was initially rolled out to Law courts and then more or less foisted on the PO to recover some of the lost investment when it was clear that it wasn't going to work, but I find it somewhat implausible that it was Blair that actively made that decision.
Seems reasonable given your previous employment 👍
Sounds about right, hopefully they decide to pass on that and when it comes around to necks on blocks he’s in the queue.<br /><br />
yes - a difficult decision; without his “cooperation” he may give a lot of “I don’t recall” answers. If however he cooperates and says - I repeatedly told Fujitsu board and the PO directors about these issues, then it could be the smoking gun needed to bring down others who are being less than Frank with the enquiry. But of course the Crown don’t know what he might say before they grant him immunity. It’s one of the problems with public inquiries - we say we want them to get to the truth and make sure it can never happen again, but then we provide a major barrier to people telling the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Bang on, has anyone ever put an estimated figure on the total of monies paid back by SPMs due to ‘errors’?
I assume it ended up in the profits pot and was subsequently paid out to senior leaders?
Found something here: https://www.computerweekly.com/news/252511844/Post-Office-cant-access-records-of-all-money-paid-to-it-by-victims-of-the-Horizon-scandal
BEIS select committee chair Darren Jones asked: “If subpostmasters were paying back shortfalls out of their own money into suspense accounts at the Post Office, why do you know who paid in what money, when and how much to give back to them?”
Read said this is because the Post Office does not have access to some of the records that go back to before 2005. “There will be areas of evidence that won’t be possible to identify and we have made it clear to our panel that this should be taken into account,” he said, adding that information even after 2005 is incomplete due to underlying system limitations.
Another difficulty identifying payments by subpostmasters to cover unexplained shortfalls is that the money went into a general suspense account, rather than a dedicated one.
Understanding what was paid back is essential, as millions of pounds were handed over to the Post Office to cover shortfalls wrongly reported by the computer system, known as Horizon, used by subpostmasters to run Post Office branches.
In fact, the group of 555 former subpostmasters, who took the Post Office to court and succeeded in proving computer errors were to blame for losses, funded a detailed analysis to ascertain the sums they repaid, which was calculated to be £8.5m. Beyond the 555, there are thousands more subpostmasters that suffered life-changing losses, which they had to repay to the Post Office.
And listening to the Newscast podcast, the other compensation schemes have had 2000+ claimants paid out, so that figure is expected to be much higher.
I find it difficult to believe that he personally pushed Horizon onto the Post Office simply to maintain some sort of supplier relationship with Fujitsu/ICL.
Evidence to the inquiry, which I find plausible:
2) Tony Blair was aware Horizon was a disaster that didn’t work. He was also told in no uncertain terms (in a message from a Fujitsu Big Boss carried to him by the British Ambassador to Japan) that if the UK govt biffed Horizon, it would cost hundreds of jobs, and do huge untold reputational damage to the government and to Britain’s standing in Europe.
The message subsequently came from Number 10 that Blair did not wish to can Horizon, therefore a way to make it work had to be found. Blair didn’t know it, but he had ordered his team to make the impossible happen. With disastrous consequences.
Obviously there's sunk cost fallacy at play as well.
he message subsequently came from Number 10 that Blair did not wish to can Horizon
I think its plausible that Blair received a message from Folks in Japan about the difficulty that binning Fujitsu/ICL off a contract would cause and I find it plausible that Blair said "Find something that we can announce this is going to work on, otherwise we all look stupid" But beyond that?
As the blog says: He couldn't have known what shit POL and Fujitsu would get up to, or how unfit the system was, or any of that stuff. But this does go to the heart of inquiries like this doesn't it? At some point some-one senior enough in either of those two organisations should've said..."Wait, what the **** are we doing here?" That they didn't or felt like they couldn't is partly why we have these sorts of 'rummaging through the ashes', no?
Most events this awful are the result of a cascade of failures and mistakes, some actions deliberate and unforgiveable, some made simply for convenience without assessing the likely consequences.
Blair had advice that the system was a dog, but chose a politically convenient fudge on this occasion. We don't always reward our politicians for reversing a bad decision.
He had no hand in the way the Post Office picked the ball up and ran with it after that, which is where things turn really bad. That was pure bad faith, corruption and cover-up.
Unfortunately the problem with public inquiries is that the public are not much interested in complex root cause stuff. They want a totem like Paula Vennells to boot off into the wilderness, rather than having to unpick the structural weaknesses and small failures that helped create the right circumstances for a scandal.
He had no hand in the way the Post Office picked the ball up and ran with it after that, which is where things turn really bad.
It's another stone to the governance pile though, which is an adjacent issue that needs to be looked at.
People can form a queue behind me to throw rotten tomatoes at Blair, but honestly I find it difficult to believe that he personally pushed Horizon onto the Post Office simply to maintain some sort of supplier relationship with Fujitsu/ICL
The excellent BBC podcast covered this. I think ( and it was a while ago that I listened to it) they said it became a diplomatic issue with the Japanese ambassador meeting Blair and saying that the project cannot be allowed to fail as, if it did, it would be seen as British Gov allowing UK division of Fujitsu to fail. From recollection of the podcast, Gordon Brown wanted to pull the plug on the project but Blair decided it should go ahead to preserve those diplomatic relations.
"politician" blames Toby Jones for not making his drama sooner.
they said it became a diplomatic issue with the Japanese ambassador meeting Blair and saying that the project cannot be allowed to fail as, if it did, it would be seen as British Gov allowing UK division of Fujitsu to fail
This isn't just about the Post Office. Nobody was keen that other Fujitsu involvement in major national government IT projects was scrutinised. Fujitsu are a major player in the Atlas Consortium, which was responsible for the introduction of the MOD's Defence Information Infrastructure, a project which overlapped the Horizon rollout. Guess what? Late, at least £3bn over budget and falling far short of the initial specification contracted for.
I'm sure nobody who's ever been involved in government procurement will be surprised to learn that the Atlas Consortium (still including Fujitsu) was subsequently awarded the lucrative contract in 2015 to "transform the DII", presumably into something nearer to what had been specified before the specification was revised downwards to match the bodge that Atlas delivered.
“politician” blames Toby Jones for not making his drama sooner.
That is marvellous, what is even more marvellous is that spoof ex-MP Henry Morris has doubled down with "duh! you do know he's an actor" tweets and is currently subject to an internet pile-on where idiots are rushing to hammer him for not recognising a spoof account when he sees it.
I'm just waiting for Sandford Police to announce they are investigating whether Morris has broken any laws in his condemnation of Rosie Holt and the spiral will truly be complete.
How can you tell when a politician is lying?
Their lips are moving.
I have to say that my experience in the health service is that politicians of all ilk are inveterate believers in a) magical thinking about the benefits of technology, particularly when it comes to saving money and b) that innovation is best encouraged from the top down.
that innovation is best encouraged from the top down.
I'd agree, many a difficult conversation with a nerd from Abbey Wood about a piece of kit that wasn't asked for, or simply was ineffective.
But yeah, on the whole user-centred design and function is the last stop on the train, if you're lucky.
But yeah, on the whole user-centred design and function is the last stop on the train, if you’re lucky.
If you leave it purely to the end user you can end up with "we have always done it like this and just need to do it a bit quicker".
Have had several solutions posing as requirements documents where I have had to ask "why?" and they are just wanting an ugly manual workaround automating vs asking for the actual problem to be fixed(one of my favourite cases was a team wanting to calculate some fields so had been working around by exporting, which allowed calculations, and then reimporting. They asked for the export/reimport to be automated vs asking for the ability to have calculated fields).
Its where good BAs or their equivalents come in but those are insanely rare.
I have to say that my experience in the health service is that politicians of all ilk are inveterate believers in a) magical thinking about the benefits of technology
Well, you say that but they assured us after Brexit that 'technology' would guarantee seamless trade and no need for border enforcements or checks and that all worked out fine.
Oh... hang on a minute....
I’d agree, many a difficult conversation with a nerd from Abbey Wood about a piece of kit that wasn’t asked for, or simply was ineffective
Same experience, sometimes involving colossal wasting of taxpayer money. For kit specced by civil servants without proper user consultation, that just didn't work.
Towards the end of my army career I came close to being posted to a defence procurement job at Abbey Wood. I managed to swerve it, but mates didn't. What they told me about the waste, overuns, duplicate effort, indifference to users etc. made me very glad I dodged that bullet.
Post Office minister statement just now. I don’t know whether I understood it rightly but it appears that the main reason that a blanket overturning of guilty verdicts is not desirable is because some guilty people may “get away with it”. Unbelievable nastiness- even from a Tory.
To be fair, and based on commentary I heard on the radio just now, that's a concern raised by some of the SPMs too. It is not beyond imagination that some small % of the SPM community were dipping the till. It's not totally ludicrous to imagine that once people realised how messed up Horizon was they could have used the confusion to take advantage. It'll be really hard in all the noise to know that. And the genuinely innocent have concerns that it possibly leaves a smudge of doubt over them still, which they don't want.
But the alternative, of retrying every case on the basis of ageing memories, lack of proper evidence either way, time and cost, etc., I'm inclined that the risk and the slight cloud has to be overall worth the outcomes. I mean, in our Beyond All Reasonable Doubt version of justice there are loads of 'innocent' people out there that really did it, so it's not an entirely untried concept.
This exactly. If a number of guilty sub postmasters get cleared that is just the price that has to be paid because of this huge miscarriage of justice. Better a few of the guilty get off than hundreds of the innocent who have had their lives ruined need to wait a day longer than needed for justice.
Huge admiration for Alan Bates and all the others who fought again and again to get these wrongs put right.
Related, but seemingly so obvious I can't se why no ones mentioned it yet, question? Why did the system never error in the SPM's favor?
Even if we assume that anyone finding a positive error would report it rather than commit fraud by pocketing the cash. Surely those in charge would be keen to fix it so the risk of loosing that money wasn't there?
Going by my experience in the NHS, leadership roles tend to go to people who say "yes", rather than the awkward buggers who tend to call things out.
They also have a massive tendency towards institutional blindness because of this quality. I suspect that the Post Office was much the same.
@theotherjonv just listening to David Davis on the News Agents podcast, part of the issue is the prosecuting authority (the PO) has been opposing the appeals, so they're tripling down on their assertion that they've done something wrong.
I know that the executive doesn't interfere with the judiciary, but in this case I would argue the PO has repeatedly demonstrated and continues to demonstrate (IMO) they lack the integrity to hold the authority to prosecute, so if they want to retain it they allow the appeals to go unchallenged. But even if that happened their process is examined in depth and changes made as required to ensure they can't do this again.
Going by my experience in the NHS, leadership roles tend to go to people who say “yes”, rather than the awkward buggers who tend to call things out.
They also have a massive tendency towards institutional blindness because of this quality. I suspect that the Post Office was much the same.
My very short, in comparison to yours, own experience with the same organisation recently are aligned with that.
I've seen more leadership acumen, values and integrity in 20yo NCO's from council estates than some senior leaders I've had the displeasure of having to work with.
part of the issue is the prosecuting authority (the PO) has been opposing the appeals, so they’re tripling down on their assertion that they’ve done something wrong.
assume you mean tripling on down on their (PO's) assertion they've done NOTHING wrong, but in that case I agree. Which makes it even more important to the wrongfully accused / convicted that they don't just get a blanket acquittal and really want to see the actual truth come out. Despite, in many cases, that delaying their acquittals and compensation to the extent where some are dying or at the very least not being of an age or health to enjoy what the compensation brings them.
Which sounds daft - just suck it up and move on while you still can - but there is such integrity in these people that it is humbling.
I can’t se why no ones mentioned it yet, question? Why did the system never error in the SPM’s favor?
It did sometimes generate a surplus, but when the SPM's reported a surplus, it was transferred out to a Post Office suspense account in order to balance the branch's books:
"The Defendant operated one or more suspense accounts in which it held unattributed surpluses including those generated from branch accounts. After a period of 3 years, such unattributed surpluses were credited to the Defendant's profits and reflected in its profit and loss accounts."
Well worth a read if you are morbidly curious:
https://www.benthamsgaze.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/07/Bates-and-Ors-v-the-Post-Office-Ltd-2019-EWHC-3408-QB.pdf#page=260
a nerd from Abbey Wood
Bath?
It’s not totally ludicrous to imagine that once people realised how messed up Horizon was they could have used the confusion to take advantage. It’ll be really hard in all the noise to know that. And the genuinely innocent have concerns that it possibly leaves a smudge of doubt over them still, which they don’t want.
The signal to noise ratio is far too low to be able to really sort out the genuine bad ones fiddling the system from the unfortunate ones caught in this unholy mess.
