Two former Post Office executives are part of a team at software firm Escher bidding to win the contract to replace the computer system at the centre of the Post Office scandal.
Escher is eyeing up Lot 2 of the government contract, which seeks a supplier to provide a commercial-off-the shelf (COTS) electronic point of sale (EPOS) software system.
The Post Office wants a supplier to assess and select an off-the-shelf Horizon replacement “tailored for its future needs” and support the implementation, including configuration, testing and roll-out. The tender is worth just over £169m.
As part of the controversial Horizon system, the Post Office used middleware from Escher, known as Riposte, which the Fujitsu-designed software was written onto.
There is no suggestion the Escher software was at fault, but a source, who worked in the development of the original Horizon EPOS system in the 1990s, told Computer Weekly in 2021 that the big flaw in Horizon was the way data was being written to Riposte.
Escher is a specialist provider of e-commerce software to postal services across the world. Computer Weekly contacted the company for comment, but it had not responded at the time of publishing.
The Post Office said: “We are speaking to a range of potential suppliers and recently hosted three pre-market engagement events. Postmasters have been represented at the market engagement events with potential suppliers, and there is further representation and opportunity for feedback throughout the transformation programme. We cannot comment on who may or may not bid, as at this stage the procurement exercise has not yet commenced.”
A source told Computer Weekly that Escher has had representatives at Post Office headquarters in recent weeks, including former Post Office staff who are involved in the Escher team targeting the contract. At least two of the team have, between them, served decades at the Post Office, including in senior roles.
Replacing Horizon
When the Post Office initially decided to replace Horizon following the fallout of the scandal, it ran a “buy versus build” project, and in 2022, a number of EPOS providers were invited to bid to supply should the “buy” option be chosen.
According to a source, Escher came out on top in the bidding process, which also included a bid from OneView. The source added that the Post Office began to build in-house in early 2021, initially as a proof of concept that turned into a full build, but buying off-the-shelf was always held over as a contingency if building in-house failed.
After the project to build a Horizon replacement in-house failed, the Post Office announced its plan to buy an off-the-shelf replacement.
A move to an off-the-shelf alternative to Horizon has been on the cards since October last year, when, during his appearance at the Post Office scandal public inquiry, Post Office chairman Nigel Railton said the company’s decision to build the new system in-house was one of two reasons the project was “set up to fail”.
Railton told the inquiry: “One was the decision ‘to get off Horizon’, which is different to building a system for the future, and the second was the decision to build in-house.”
He said there were many “horror stories” of people trying to build systems in-house. “I think, based on my experience, that this was always set up to fail,” he told the public inquiry.
As Computer Weekly revealed in May last year, a review by government project management experts at the Infrastructure and Projects Authority (IPA) rated the project as “currently unachievable”, with budgets ballooning from £180m to £1.1bn, and implementation being delayed by as much as five years.
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).
