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

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

The Post Office’s IT boss said he doesn’t expect subpostmasters to simply start trusting him and his team because they are new, but to judge them on their actions.

In an interview with Computer Weekly, Andy Nice, the Post Office’s recently installed chief transformation officer, also said he and his team entered their roles with his “eyes wide open” about the challenges ahead. “We all we knew what we were letting ourselves in for,” he told Computer Weekly. “We don’t expect subpostmasters to just start trusting us because we are new people, it will take time and we want to be judged by our actions. How we show up.”

He said the team are determined to make the Horizon system replacement work for subpostmasters. “We don’t want to just come out and say, ‘We are a new team and it will all be fine’ – we want to prove it.”

Nice told Computer Weekly he knew little about the goings on at the organisation until the ITV dramatisation of the Post Office scandal, put it top of the news headlines. “I am like most people on the street,” he said. “I was probably vaguely aware of the Horizon scandal before the ITV drama.”

But after that, his eyes were wide open. Nice said he and his staff have been moved by what they have learnt about the scandal in the past 12 months and want to fix things.

Although the new IT leadership team wasn’t involved in what came before, it must confront it head-on. “I am not linked to the past, but it weights heavy on the business today,” he said. “You can’t get away from it and the damage that was done. The team that have come in are new, and we are keen to talk about it.”

Nice said what has happened to subpostmasters is a motivating force for him and his colleagues in IT. “I don’t think it is possible to watch the drama and documentary and not feel incredibly upset and stressed about what happened to these subpostmasters,” he said. “You can’t help being taken in and moved by it. For me and others that came into the businesses, this is a real driver to getting it fixed.”

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 is 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 ********* 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. 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,” added Nice.

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).

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