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The UK Home Office has given two contracts valued at almost £25mn to Fujitsu since July’s general election, despite Labour MPs criticising awards to the company at the centre of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal when the party was in opposition.
The government department handed Fujitsu a contract worth £9.6mn for procurement of hardware equipment and a separate £15mn contract for continued provision of law enforcement software services, according to government data published last month and in November.
The decision to award the contracts, worth a combined £24.6mn and starting in October, came after prominent Labour MPs joined other politicians last year in calling for the Japanese technology company to be barred from receiving state contracts because of its role in the Horizon scandal.
More than 900 Post Office branch managers were convicted between 1999 and 2015 in cases involving faulty data from the Horizon accounting software developed by Fujitsu.
A public outcry over the scandal — deemed the biggest miscarriage of justice in modern British history — led the previous Conservative government last year to introduce legislation to quash convictions.
Jo Maugham, executive director at the Good Law Project campaign group, said: “It really is a slap in the face for the victims of the Post Office scandal that Fujitsu rakes in new multimillion-pound government contracts whilst they continue to wait for proper compensation.”
In January last year, Fujitsu said it was voluntarily not going to bid for government contracts until the public inquiry into the Horizon scandal ended, apart from in cases of “existing customer relationships or an agreed need for Fujitsu skills and capability”.
Liam Byrne, Labour MP and chair of the House of Commons business and trade committee, had that month said it was “vital there’s now a moratorium on new contracts for Fujitsu until we’ve got to the bottom of this terrible miscarriage of justice”.
Kevan Jones, then a Labour MP and a member of the Horizon Compensation Advisory Board that oversees compensation relating to the scandal, at the time also called for a moratorium until the company “gave a full explanation of what they did”.
Fujitsu has won some public sector contracts since making the commitment. But its decision to restrict such bidding wiped out the value of goodwill on the balance sheet of its UK business, which booked a £78.6mn impairment in the year to March 2024.
The Financial Times in November reported Fujitsu had been awarded £1.4mn in UK public sector contracts since it said it would suspend bidding for them. The company is also one of 39 listed by the cabinet office as a “strategic supplier”.
The Lincolnshire Police and Crime Commissioner has also since awarded Fujitsu a £247,481.20 contract for the renewal of charges for co-location data centre services, government data published in December showed.
Marc Jones, Lincolnshire Police & Crime Commissioner, said the contract was a “short-term extension on a contract that goes back well over a decade”, originally agreed by a contractor, and it was “critical that Lincolnshire police have the time necessary to find the best alternative”.
Former sub-postmasters have criticised the administration of the compensation schemes, citing the time taken to process claims and the sums of money being offered.
The Commons business committee last week urged the government to set binding timeframes to process claims, with financial penalties passed on to the claimant if deadlines are not met.
Maugham said Labour in opposition had been “very vocal about the need for a moratorium on new Fujitsu contracts. But now they’re in government you have to wonder what’s changed.”
The government said “these contracts are in line with Fujitsu’s bidding approach for public contracts” and that it had “been clear that those responsible for the Horizon scandal must be held accountable”.
It added: “Before any further action can be taken, we must wait for the Horizon Inquiry to conclude.”
Fujitsu said it was “working with the UK government to ensure we adhere to the voluntary restrictions we put in place regarding bidding for new contracts while the Post Office inquiry is ongoing”.
It added: “Based on the findings of the inquiry we will work with government on the appropriate actions, including contribution to compensation. We continue to offer our deepest apologies to the sub-postmasters and their families.”
