Copyright cityam
The IT company at the heart of the Post Office scandal raked in nearly half a billion pounds in public sector contracts between 2024 and 2025, an increase on the previous year’s figure despite it having pledged not to bid for new government contracts. Fujitsu, whose faulty Horizon accounting system led to the wrongful convictions of over 900 Post Office workers over several decades, earned £453m from government contracts in the 12 months to April 2025 according to data from public sector contract analyst Tussell. The figure represents a one per cent jump on the total it made on UK public sector work the previous year, despite dozens of lawmakers having called for Fujitsu to be barred from all government tenders in the wake of the imbroglio. The Horizon scandal, which saw nearly 1,000 subpostmasters incorrectly convicted of stealing from the Post Office, has been branded one of the worst miscarriages of justice in British history. Between 1999 to 2015, Fujitsu’s faulty accounting technology suggested thousands of subpostmasters – the self-employed owners of Post Office branches – had been stealing from their accounts. The false readings were then pursued at an industrial scale in the courts, with the Post Office using its unusual legal powers to bring over 600 convictions itself. Public outcry led the previous Conservative government to announce a major inquiry into the scandal and its potential redress scheme in 2021 that is being led by lawyer Sir Wyn Williams. Post Office scandal inquiry ongoing Since the extent of the scandal emerged, several MPs have called for Fujitsu to be stripped of its right to bid for any government contracts, and a group comprising over 70 lawmakers was established to demand action on the firm’s eligibility for public sector work. In January 2024, the tech firm’s UK boss also wrote to ministers to confirm it would not bid for new government tenders until the work of the national inquiry concludes. Despite Williams still not publishing his final report, the Japanese tech firm has been awarded multiple multimillion-pound contracts in the past year, including a £300m brief from HM Revenue and Customs and £125m from HM Land Registry to “deliver a modern digitally enabled ICT” network. The Tussell figures were published just a day before the deadline for Fujitsu to publish a paper – ordered by recommendations from the inquiry – to outline an “agreed programme of restorative justice” for the subpostmasters. Several former Post Office workers have criticised the redress scheme in place to compensate them for their incorrect convictions. Janet Skinner, who was wrongly jailed in 2007 for theft, has said the battle for full and fair compensation is “the most difficult situation I have ever had to deal with. And I went to prison”. And the victims’ commissioner Baroness Newlove recently launched a withering assessment of the Post Office’s intractable management of the scheme, branding it as tortuous for subpostmasters as the original injustice. “Far from offering catharsis, the compensation process was seen to be as bad as or even worse an experience than the initial investigation, prosecution and injustice itself,” she wrote in a letter to ministers. Fujitsu was approached for comment.
