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Ian hislop mentioned yesterday that computer weekly ran it in 2009. He implied private eye picked it up after that. I've been reading about probably once every

by pipes 3y ago

Ian hislop mentioned yesterday that computer weekly ran it in 2009. He implied private eye picked it up after that. I've been reading about probably once every two years in the guardian. 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.

razakel 3y ago
Yeah, this is a huge ongoing scandal, and you'd only know about it if you were in tech or a politics nerd. 750 victims, including bankruptcies, prison sentences and suicides, and just one week after a TV drama something is actually being done about it. (That it can be used to attack Starmer and Davey is, I'm sure, unrelated.) Heads need to roll over this. Can you believe the woman responsible nearly became a bishop?
- pjc50 3y ago
  > 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.
TheOtherHobbes 3y ago
The cover-up is at least as dangerous as the original incompetence. It was a heavy-handed, conscious, legally aggressive cover-up. The people responsible knew exactly what was happening, and they were more than happy for the blame to fall on innocent sub-postmasters. 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.
- csan 3y ago
  Procurement is indeed broken/corrupt. See also the recent £1.4 HMCTS reform programme. https://csan149.substack.com/p/justice-at-risk https://csan149.substack.com/p/justice-at-risk
- toyg 3y ago
  > But Fujitsu still keep getting government contracts. The brand is getting a bit too tarnished though. I wouldn't be surprised to see them rebranding soon.
  - hermitcrab 3y ago
    Or increasing their political 'donations'.
- acdha 3y ago
  > But Fujitsu still keep getting government contracts 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”.
  - pjc50 3y ago
    Indeed. You can't sack/blacklist Capita or Serco or Fujitsu, no matter how bad their conduct, because they're absolutely critical to British state capacity. And the only reason they've been made that critical is profit and union-busting. Which is kept in place by recycling donations to the ruling party.

by pipes 3y ago

razakel 3y ago

Yeah, this is a huge ongoing scandal, and you'd only know about it if you were in tech or a politics nerd. 750 victims, including bankruptcies, prison sentences and suicides, and just one week after a TV drama something is actually being done about it. (That it can be used to attack Starmer and Davey is, I'm sure, unrelated.) Heads need to roll over this. Can you believe the woman responsible nearly became a bishop?

pjc50 3y ago
> 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.

TheOtherHobbes 3y ago

The cover-up is at least as dangerous as the original incompetence. It was a heavy-handed, conscious, legally aggressive cover-up. The people responsible knew exactly what was happening, and they were more than happy for the blame to fall on innocent sub-postmasters. 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.

csan 3y ago
Procurement is indeed broken/corrupt. See also the recent £1.4 HMCTS reform programme. https://csan149.substack.com/p/justice-at-risk https://csan149.substack.com/p/justice-at-risk
toyg 3y ago
> But Fujitsu still keep getting government contracts. The brand is getting a bit too tarnished though. I wouldn't be surprised to see them rebranding soon.
- hermitcrab 3y ago
  Or increasing their political 'donations'.
acdha 3y ago
> But Fujitsu still keep getting government contracts 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”.
- pjc50 3y ago
  Indeed. You can't sack/blacklist Capita or Serco or Fujitsu, no matter how bad their conduct, because they're absolutely critical to British state capacity. And the only reason they've been made that critical is profit and union-busting. Which is kept in place by recycling donations to the ruling party.