Post Office and Fujitsu bosses quizzed about i report on Horizon glitches
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00:00 As reported in the I this month, near identical, I use a quote there, errors were found in an earlier post office IT project supplied by a subsidiary of Fujitsu, ICL Pathway, which was in 1999.
00:15 So I ask again, when were management aware, and if you're unable to answer now, will you commit to asking executives to formally write to the chair of the committee to provide that detail?
00:27 I'll say two things. First of all, there were known bugs and errors in the system at a very early stage. You ask me the month and year, I can't give you the month and year, but from the very start, there were bugs and errors in the system.
00:41 Why did this earlier project fail? Why was the trial of the system showed errors in ICL Pathway, which could have led to potentially thousands of sub postmasters being rejected? Why was this earlier system, which is near identical to Horizon, why was that flashing up errors?
00:58 So I don't know what was happening in 1995 to 1999. What I do know is that there were bugs and errors in the system when it rolled out. In any large IT project, there will always be some bugs and errors in any system, particularly of this scale.
01:14 The important thing is, what do we do with that information? Do we take that information and share it with the post office? Yes, we did. How the post office then chose to use that information in their prosecutions is entirely on the post office's side.
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