Ministerial questions

Campaigning peer James Arbuthnot said he was angered on hearing the figures. “Government ministers really should put themselves in the shoes of a subpostmaster and ask themselves, ‘How would I feel?  Does Fujitsu’s behaviour really not matter?  Am I happy to see the people who colluded in sending so many innocent people to prison, rewarded in this way?’”

He also questioned whether there is no alternative to contracting Fujitsu: “Are we so dependent on them? What does that say about our bargaining power, or about our resilience?”

Ministers are well positioned to apply pressure, given that, according to the Tussell figures, the central government departments they run accounted for 98% of Fujitsu’s public sector sales.

Furthermore, although Fujitsu’s growth was slender at 1.2%, it came at a time when overall spending on technology by the UK public sector declined 2%, according to Tussell.

The figures add weight to claims within Fujitsu that, despite the negative impact of its link to the Post Office scandal, the company will get its UK government business back to normal within about 12 to 18 months after a period of “flux.”

This was the view of a member of Fujitsu’s top team of executives. He expected to see things improve after Fujitsu agreed the amount it will pay towards the costs of the Post Office scandal, but the latest figures show the firm is already recovering government business.

The executive’s comment came in July this year, days after the publication of a report that linked the scandal, which Fujitsu fuelled, to 13 suicides, 10 attempted suicides and 59 people contemplating suicide.

In a recording heard by Computer Weekly, the Fujitsu leader, who has now left the company, told colleagues: “My personal prediction [is] 12 to 18 months of this sort of flux, and then once we’ve actually made the contribution [towards scandal costs], I think there will be the whole self-cleaning process, and then I think we should be back to normal trading terms.

“I still feel as an organisation in the UK, we are built to service the public sector – our delivery model, our people, our capability.”

In the same meeting, the executive told colleagues the first Post Office Horizon public inquiry report was “not that bad,” despite it linking the IT system’s problems with numerous suicides.

The former executive apologised for his comments via a company email account: “I am very sorry if my words have caused harm to any of the victims of the Post Office Horizon scandal. I am not involved in, or responsible for, Fujitsu’s response to the Post Office Horizon IT inquiry. This was my own personal speculation that I shared with my team as part of a private and informal discussion.”

The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly 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).