Post Office pauses Horizon data migration
Met Police are ‘not keen’
The Post Office’s use of Horizon, the Fujitsu-built system at the centre of a decades-long scandal, cost hundreds of sub-postmasters their jobs and reputations.
The Post Office has been set to replace Horizon for years, although the plan to replace the full system hit a block in November due to delays in the development of the New Branch IT (NBIT) programme.
At the same time, plans were announced to migrate legacy data from Horizon to a Post Office cloud. That project has now been (temporarily) halted.
According to Post Office chief transformation officer Andy Nice, speaking to Computer Weekly, the Met Police were “not keen” on the migration going forward “until they were clear and satisfied regarding our approach.”
Nice said in November that the plan was to start testing the data migration after Christmas and begin the project early in 2025. However, he has now said the work has been paused to make sure the Met are “comfortable with the migration process and that it doesn’t impact its ongoing investigations.”
Those investigations are not necessarily related to the Horizon scandal; they could also include information on other cases related to the Post Office, like robberies.
“Both the Post Office and Fujitsu are working closely with the Metropolitan Police to assure them on this matter, but this is taking time, and they were not keen for us to progress with the work until they were clear and satisfied regarding our approach. This exercise is ongoing, so we have paused the data migration work in the meantime,” Nice said.
Moving data from Horizon to a Post Office cloud is intended to ensure the company is no longer reliant on Fujitsu to provide data via audit record queries (ARQs). This is how the Post Office has retrieved data from Horizon since the system was introduced, but only has a limited number of free requests before being charged.
The data from Horizon could have proved sub-postmasters were not to blame for accounting shortfalls, but the Post Office was reluctant to use the system due to potential costs.