Why Horizon is just the tip of the iceberg for Britain’s crumbling IT
James Titcomb
7 min read
Whitehall IT
Imagine if four in every five bridges built in Britain fell down. There would be national outrage. The companies building those bridges, the civil servants who ordered them and the ministers in charge would all likely pay with their jobs or worse.
Fortunately, the majority of bridges do not tend to fall over. But there is one area that suffers such rates of failure.
Twenty years ago, researchers at Oxford calculated that 84pc of large IT projects in the UK failed in some form – either by being cancelled, failing to deliver, arriving late, or going significantly over budget.
Software and bridges are not the same. But growing anger about the Post Office Horizon scandal has shone a new light on the dismal record in building IT systems.
Faulty software built by the Japanese tech giant Fujitsu led to hundreds of sub-postmasters’ lives being ruined after misguided prosecutions.
We are becoming increasingly reliant on computer systems across our lives. Could another Horizon scandal be lurking in the code?
In 2011, a committee of MPs called the Government’s approach to IT a “recipe for rip-offs” while researchers have called Britain “a world leader in ineffective IT schemes for government”.
Insiders describe a sclerotic approach to computer systems and a chronic shortage of skilled staff, with Westminster captured by an oligopoly of IT giants growing rich.
Last year, Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee warned that Britain’s IT infrastructure continued to be utterly reliant on ageing computer systems, with civil servants more likely to expensively prolong the lifespan of old programmes rather than risk starting afresh.
This, critics say, has led to an embarrassing litany of failures in the computer systems that the country relies on for everything from pensions to stopping airliners from crashing into one another.
The failures of Fujitsu’s Horizon system, in which transactions were often double-counted, leading to artificial deficits at Post Offices, have attracted enormous attention because of the miscarriages of justice it led to: sub-postmasters being prosecuted, jailed and committing suicide.
Those cases emerged because the Post Office vigorously pursued private prosecutions aided by its own investigative branch.
But it is only one of a series of notorious public computing projects that have failed to deliver. They include New Labour’s botched National Programme for IT in the NHS, which was abandoned more than a decade after it was announced and as it was billions over budget; and Fujitsu’s Libra, designed to provide a national system for magistrates, which was described as “one of the worst IT projects ever seen” and partly taken away from the Japanese giant after going hugely over budget.
Last year, 2,000 flights were cancelled after a bespoke air traffic control software system crashed.
An IT meltdown in air traffic control systems last August left passengers stranded - Carl Court/Getty Images
“Horizon is an extreme example of this but from a technical point of view there are other systems that are similarly parlous and poorly designed,” says Mike Bracken, who ran the Government Digital Service and is a founding partner at the Public Digital consultancy.
He adds that the Post Office scandal was made worse by inadequate technical knowledge and governance.
“The other key issue with Horizon is that the Post Office was judge and jury and could choose to prosecute.”
Britain was once a world leader in major IT systems. Colossus, the pioneering programmable computer used by the Bletchley Park codebreakers during the Second World War, was actually designed by a Post Office engineer.
The Central Computer and Telecommunications Agency was credited with developing technical skills within government until it was wound down at the end of the century.
Instead, in the Nineties, successive governments embarked on a series of giant IT projects, outsourced to a handful of large companies.
In 1994, Inland Revenue awarded a 10-year £3bn contract to the US software giant EDS, founded by the two-time presidential candidate Ross Perot. As part of the deal, 1,900 IT staff at Inland Revenue moved to the company.
The deal would eventually go wrong when EDS’s system failed to handle new tax credits, but at first it was seen as enough of a success to be imitated across the public sector. Enormous contracts were awarded, almost exclusively to the major IT companies large enough to handle them: the likes of Capgemini, Accenture, IBM – and Fujitsu.
Helen Margetts, a professor of internet and society at the Oxford Institute and director of the Alan Turing Institute’s Public Policy Programme, says this separated Britain from many other countries modernising their own systems.
“What was unique about the UK was the size and length of the contracts, these were really big contracts that fewer and fewer companies could bid for, we were outsourcing entire IT divisions,” she says.
“All the expertise was stripped out. Contracts got bigger and bigger and people in government became less and less keen on being involved. The companies promised to take over all the misery and risk of these great big contracts.”
Very public failures such as the fiasco around the National Programme for IT at the NHS, combined with pressure on the public finances, led the Coalition government to declare in 2010 that the era of “mega IT contracts” had come to an end.
Techies returned to Whitehall as part of a Government Digital Service division, which led to relative successes such as the unified gov.uk website.
However, reversing the mistakes of the last three decades has been slow. Fujitsu has won £4.9bn of public contracts since a court found in 2019 that the Horizon system was at fault.
Much of that has been spent on extending the life of existing systems, leaving services reliant on ageing technology.
Last year, the Public Accounts Committee found that departments were continuing to use outdated “legacy” systems instead of building new ones fit for the 21st century, in part because of a lack of skills.
“These have resulted in services which, although they might look good on the surface, are costly and problematic to run,” it said.
In one case in 2014, Whitehall struck a £5.8m deal with Microsoft to support tens of thousands of computers still running Microsoft’s 13-year-old XP operating system, rather than upgrade to a modern version.
Some systems such as those for paying pensions and managing borders date back to the 1970s.
In a blog post last week, Bracken decried a “yawning gap in knowledge and curiosity around technology [that] remains true across senior levels of government, the civil service, parliament, and the judiciary… buttressed by a marriage of convenience between those leaders and large enterprise IT companies like Fujitsu”.
He added: “When the alternative is for them to engage in wicked problems that are unglamorous, difficult to understand and do their careers little good, many are all [too] happy to hand over cash and control to the contractors.”
Margetts says a continued reliance on old computer systems, rather than replacing them with modern ones, has set us up poorly for advances in areas such as artificial intelligence.
Both the Conservatives and Labour believe they can modernise the state using AI. Chancellor Jeremy Hunt last week said at Davos that he hoped to harness the technology to make public sector services more efficient.
However, these systems rely on vast quantities of data that are inaccessible on our ageing computer systems.
Margetts says: “It makes it difficult for agencies to innovate when you’re operating from a very old system that doesn’t generate data.”
Outrage about the Post Office scandal has led to promises that the victims’ injustices will be resolved swiftly. Fixing Britain’s shaky IT systems will take far longer.
