This case goes right the way back to between 2000 and 2014 when the Post Office wrongly prosecuted 736 sub-postmasters and sub-postmistresses for false accounting and theft based on information from their computer system called Horizon.

The effects were absolutely devastating! Many were sentenced to prison and even many of those who escaped a jail sentence were financially ruined by their convictions. Marriages broke down. They were shunned by the communities as cheating charlatans and suffered years of emotional torture.

Eventually, their convictions were overturned; the judge’s damning statements describing the computer system Horizon - provided by tech giant ICL Fujitsu - as not "remotely robust" for the first 10 years of its use, and still had problems after that. He went on to say the system contained "bugs, errors and defects", and that there was a "material risk" that shortfalls in branch accounts were caused by the system.

The software cost £1 billion.

So how could a massive tech giant have software with so many bugs that it led to the IT scandal of the century?

The first reason is that user feedback from Post Office managers who raised serious issues with the software were dismissed rather than properly investigated. Secondly, training was deemed to be poor. Communication downtime was problem as the system was not fully cloud based. In addition, attempts at mediation and efforts to highlight and resolve bugs in the system seem to have been met with resistance, James Arbuthnot, the MP leading on the matter, accused the Post Office of rejecting 90% of applications for mediation.

One learning that we can take from this is that giant corporate "Blue Chip" software is not always best and that you can’t beat working with a friendly, approachable software provider who you can directly talk to and is committed to working with you and your requirements. At SupplierCRM all our customers can have direct access to the people who actually write the code. And our intuitive cloud based systems (something the Post Office is only just coming around to appreciating) are great for data reliability and user-friendliness.