Rosie Brocklehurst reports on a little-covered aspect of the Post Office scandal.
Empathy and improving people’s well-being is part of the message of Fujitsu’s Chief Executive. It is emblazoned across the Fujitsu website. But they are words with little meaning to the children of subpostmasters who grew up under the shadow of the Horizon scandal. There was no empathy in that darkness, no concern for their well-being during the years their parents were falsely accused of stealing from the post offices they ran because of Fujitsu’s software bugs.
Twelve days after the televised transmission in the UK of ITV’s Mr Bates vs the Post Office, on January 16th this year, a BBC reporter shoved a microphone under the nose of Takahito Tokita while he walked between venues at the World Economic Forum at Davos. Asked if he would like to apologise to British subpostmasters for his firm’s faulty software he replied: “Of course, Fujitsu has apologised for the impact on them, their lives and that of their families.”
When Mr Tokita met Kemi Badenoch at the 2023 Davos forum, she failed to mention the Horizon Post Office scandal. She was Minister for Trade and Equalities at the time but was three weeks away from being appointed Secretary of State at the Department for Business and Trade (DBT) by Rishi Sunak.
Paul Patterson, variously described as Fujitsu’s European MD or its UK chief, tasked with attending both the Public Inquiry and the Department of Business and Trade (DBT) Parliamentary Committee, also apologised to subpostmasters and their families in January this year. It had taken a total of 24 years for this country to receive a public apology from Fujitsu and an admission, from Patterson, that yes, indeed, Fujitsu had known about bugs, errors and defects from the outset. But Mr Patterson fell short of saying who had known what and when. What he did offer was an apology to subpostmasters and their families.
At this point in the story, at the beginning of March this year, Katie Downey, daughter of a subpostmaster bankrupted by the debacle, had decided to write to Patterson and take him up on his recognition of the harms done to families, in order to ask Fujitsu to set up a benevolent fund for the redress of so many lost chances experienced by subpostmasters’ children.
At the time of the ITV drama and the Fujitsu apology, a reported $1 billion dollars was wiped off the company’s share price. £1 billion was also the figure bandied about following the appearance of Mr Patterson at the DBT Parliamentary Committee – a figure it was mooted, that Fujitsu might be asked to pay the British Government for the compensation bill. It was £1 billion, or perhaps half that amount, or a large proportion of the total bill – media commentators were unsure and confused. Lack of clarity serves Fujitsu just as much as it serves the Post Office in this horror story.
What was clear was that Fujitsu’s European boss was full of contrition and the consequence would be a large contribution to Government coffers. Yes, the words resembled a major concession, but it was all a bit vague. But then, why would it not be? The compensation process itself has been, and still is, stuck in a mire of bureaucratic, legal obfuscation and delay that is shocking, sitting as it does with half of the responsibility for sorting claims remaining within the Post Office itself. In this way, the Post Office has been the investigating officer, prosecutor, executioner and Uncle Ebenezer Scrooge all at once.
For the time being, declared Patterson in front of the televised DBT Committee, with a measured sense of judicial aplomb, all bidding for Government contracts by Fujitsu would pause. As it turned out, it was to be kind of ‘quick, let’s get a cup of tea before the next half starts’, sort of pause. For last month, a document was leaked that showed there was no real halt to Fujitsu’s comfy bidding relationship with the British Government for contracts.
The pause was simply a kind of regrouping that enabled Fujitsu to try alternative gambits; to segue sideways through a gateway rather than rush head-on into a bidding process. This was snakes and ladders where the snakes were much shorter than usual and plentiful ladders were provided by various Government departments already tied in to contractual obligations and half-completed IT systems. Fujitsu’s man at the helm in Europe knew as he spoke that £650 million of contracts were already signed and yet to be delivered so there was plenty of work to focus on, and money flowing in all the time from that.
It did not take long to discover that £27 million had been set aside, allegedly for something called Project Holly, as reported in Computer Weekly which first broke the Horizon scandal story in 2009.
‘Holly’ is apparently a reputational crisis management initiative to shore up the share price internationally. But as to what Japan and the Japanese know about the scandal, virtually nothing has been written in any Japanese newspaper or television news platform, not even when Mr Tokita apologised at Davos, or Mr Patterson spoke in the UK at the DBT committee. Asahi Shimbun, one of Japan’s oldest papers of record, included a short interview with Katie Downey, founder of Lost Chances in April and there was a small piece in the Japan Times, an English language newspaper. That is pretty well the whole of the coverage the scandal has received in Fujitsu’s home country.
On January 9th, a few days after the ITV drama caused ripples of outrage in the social fabric of Britain, the Spectator magazine ran an article by Philip Patrick entitled: “Why no one in Japan is talking about the Fujitsu Post Office scandal”.
Firstly, no one in Japan has seen the ITV drama. ITVX does not extend there and it is not one of the twelve regions in four continents where the drama has been successfully sold. It’s been seen on Public Service Broadcasting channel Masterpiece Theatre in the USA, and the US is an important IT market. But Japan is unaware of the TV programme. The company is, according to the Spectator article, “a zombie company” – one that staggers on because of its close relationship to the Japanese Government.
But that is easy to say of many large companies. Cronyism is not an unknown facet of British business life, where revolving doors between regulatory bodies and corporates are a symptom of much that is wrong in UK corporate life as in many other parts of the world, including Japan. It is hard to point the finger when culpability lies at our own door, particularly in the toxic culture that existed at Post Office Limited, whose centuries-old power to investigate and prosecute has absolutely no equivalent in Japan.
The Japanese people know of some scandals concerning Fujitsu, but they are scandals that happened in Japan to Japanese people. In 2020, Fujitsu’s IT systems failures resulted in a one day’s trading loss on the Tokyo Stock Exchange. In 2002, 2.5 million delays in debit transactions occurred in Fujitsu-linked ATMs. These incidents hit Japanese people’s pockets but did not impact in anywhere near the same way on Japanese lives as Horizon failings did on subpostmasters in the UK.
Japanese people remain largely unaware that the Fujitsu Horizon Post Office scandal saw over 900 convicted, with 3,000 people plus their families – or more – impacted, or that it is a story that stretched over 24 years, much of it with the Government ‘shareholder’ within the Treasury and the Post Office in complete denial that there had been any wrongdoing. No one in Japan knows that Fujitsu engineers’ evidence in trials was tampered with, false statements made, nor that disclosure of documents had been denied to the defence in trials which had put people behind bars, including a pregnant woman who was jailed on her son’s tenth birthday.
The fact that penury and bankruptcy resulting from suspensions and prosecutions which in turn led to evictions and homelessness in many cases is unknown to the Japanese, as is the fact that a pernicious contract made responsibility the sole reserve of the subpostmaster. Anxiety and panic prevailed, and isolation and cultural banishment were common. Social stigma in many cases resulted in shame-based mental breakdown which the Post Office did not wish to know about and neither did Fujitsu, certainly not on its help desk. In these circumstances, the vicious bullying of children at school and in communities and the subsequent post-traumatic stress that went unrelieved and untreated were a drama that played out somewhere in the wings, unseen and unacknowledged. None of this is known in Japan.
The fact that several subpostmasters developed a dependency on alcohol and drugs – as we now know some lives ended in suicide or an early death well before any convictions were overturned – was a matter of scarcely admitted regret here. The Times reported in February that 251 subpostmasters have died without ever seeing justice. But all along, the Japanese people have been kept in the dark about the causes and the consequences of Fujitsu’s Horizon failures.
Empathy and well-being are Fujitsu mission statements that do not lie easily with Fujitsu’s actions so far in this shameful saga. Who knows what the Japanese CEO thought of his European MD’s comments? Who knows exactly what smoke and mirrors strategy to protect its interests is now being developed within Project Holly?
It has been five weeks since Katie Downey and Lost Chances wrote to Paul Patterson. Just before another media appearance for the group he replied. “It was unsatisfactory response, said Katie Downey. “When Paul Patterson replied he seemed to think meeting with us is dependent on our parents’ lawyers. He is kicking any meeting with us into the long grass. There should be no barrier to him meeting with our group now.”
“We are not prepared to wait like those of our parents who survived, waited,” said Katie Downey. “Our parents wanted the best for us and we found we had to care for them when we were children. Many of us had our innocence and our childhood taken away and grew up too soon. If Fujitsu fails to come to us now then we must be prepared to go to them , and we must also find ways in this technological new age to reach out to the Japanese people and their children and make them fully aware of how our families suffered because of incompetence, denial, lies, cover ups and self-interest.”
Rosie Brocklehurst is a journalist and press officer (retired) who worked for the Labour Party, LWT, the BBC and several charities.
Inset image c/o Katie Downey.
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