They all now jump in on it and elide the years of work put in by the PE. This is a common tactic in media outlets, esp. here, for the major sources to try to "own" issues with nearly zero work put in on them.
The thing that is so upsetting about all of this is that it's been pretty much ignored by government since 2009, the post office systematically lied and covered this up while knowing it was destroying innocent people. And the only reason they got traction was due to a docu drama last week. I don't normally feel like this, but I really hope people from the post office go to prison and lose their pensions over this. They deserve worse.
Horizon cost £2.4bn and was apparently developed by a team of eight, three of whom were described by the team lead as "incompetent."
Fujitsu also screwed up an IT system for the NHS. £10bn was wasted on "the biggest IT failure ever seen."
But Fujitsu still keep getting government contracts.
Which is an even bigger scandal. There's a real stench of corruption around these deals, and of government procurement in general in the UK.
See also HS2, PPE procurement, Test and Trace, and others.
The brand is getting a bit too tarnished though. I wouldn't be surprised to see them rebranding soon.
This isn’t terribly surprising: government contracting is a hard business to qualify for and relatively few companies have done so. They all have failures along with successes so any attempt to ban one of them will be opposed by the people who’ve found some semblance of a working team as well as any politicians they’re close to, and it’s hard to argue that most of the replacements would be substantially more likely to deliver working systems.
The underlying problem here is that this work should be run by civil servants who are familiar with the domain and have the proper incentives. This is politically anathema to the Tory/New Labor types (or Republicans here in the US) who are committed to the fiction that there are enormous cost savings to be had from outsourcing government functions and they aren’t going lead a serious procurement reform effort because the first answer would be “most things are less efficient when contracted out” and the second would be “you need to pay market rates for technical talent even to contract effectively and empower those experts”.
Where did most of that money go? Was there 8000 middle managers?
Heads need to roll over this. Can you believe the woman responsible nearly became a bishop?
Well, yes? Have you seen the kinds of people elevated to the House of Lords lately? These institutions are now profoundly corrupt.
Private Eye definitely did a lot of work, but they were not the only ones, and multiple freelancers and journalists worked on it "in the shadows" for years.
The Post Office tactics of calling editors to make threats and play down the stories were also quite influential.
https://www.postofficescandal.uk/
The scandal has hit the headlines many, many times across all the outlets, particularly in 2019-21 with the litigation and appeal cases. It was the subject of an episode of BBC Panorama in 2015 (fronted by Nick Wallis).
But it all comes to nought. The victims are still out of pocket and still have criminal prosecutions. If the media are to blame, then so is the judiciary, and so is the government, who have had it in their power to provide financial redress. And of course the Post Office and Fujitsu are the culprits.
There is talk of legislation to quash all of the convictions, which is nice, but it's unlikely most sub-postmasters will see any real compensation.
And the people who made a fortune off this will almost certainly keep it.
This story wasnt glamourous for them and they only swooped in when well after the court cases when it looked like there would be political dimension. Its sad that proper investigative journalism is only found in the smaller publications these days.
I'll tell you more: it's only being pushed now, after the tv production, because it tangentially involves the two leaders of the opposition.
Ed Davey, more damningly, was a minister with responsibility for postal matters at the time the scandal was really breaking. He basically made no effort to help the victims, and just parroted the Post Office line. He now says he was lied to "on a massive scale" which, as a line of defence, is a bit weak. Tbh, the LibDem record, in that government, is pretty bad anyway; simply reminding people of that "Coalition" government is probably enough to blow a few holes in their electoral boats.
There was a BBC Panoram program in 2015: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4961332/