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Frustration as Post Office Horizon replacement contract signing delayed again

If signed off, cloud-based EPOS system will replace controversial Horizon software from Fujitsu

Karl Flinders
By
Published: 17 Jul 2026 12:30

Subpostmasters are frustrated as uncertainty remains around the contract to replace the controversial Horizon system, which is at the centre of the Post Office scandal.

The formal signing of a £170m contract with OneView Commerce, to provide an off-the-shelf electronic point of sale (EPOS) system, has been delayed for a fifth time.

This is Lot 2 of the tender designed to seek suppliers to replace Horizon software and supporting services, worth a total of £500m.

An update of the tender notice for the Lot 2 contract said: “Please note that the standstill period for Lot 2 of this procurement has been extended until 29 July 2026, therefore the earliest the contract can be signed will be 30 July 2026.”

The contract was initially set to be signed on 3 June, but this was extended to 15 June, then to 26 June, and then to 8 July, 17 July, and as of today, 30 July.

One working subpostmaster said: “I think it’s frustrating, the fact that the new system is being delayed. Postmasters need a system that they can have confidence in. The new Post Office administration have had 18 months now, and they don’t seem to be that much further forward.”

The OneView Commerce deal was first announced on 21 May alongside Lot 1, the £322.8m contract awarded to Accenture to run Horizon, but while the Accenture contract was signed off, the formal signing of the EPOS agreement has been repeatedly put back.

Riposte flaw

One source said he understands that the contract is being challenged. The unsuccessful bidder shortlisted for the contract was Escher. As part of the controversial Horizon system, the Post Office used middleware from Escher, known as Riposte, which the Fujitsu-designed software was written onto. There is no suggestion the Escher software was at fault, but a source, who worked in the development of the original Horizon EPOS system in the 1990s, told Computer Weekly in 2021 that the big flaw in Horizon was the way data was being written to Riposte.

OneView’s software is set to replace the Horizon EPOS system with a software-as-a-service application hosted in the cloud, which the Post Office specified must use a modern microservice architecture. It hopes the software will provide point-of-sale capabilities and other functionality required for an end-to-end retail platform. The move to standardised, off-the-shelf software represents a change in strategy for the Post Office, which throughout the Horizon era had insisted on using bespoke software designed for its own purposes.

One subpostmaster told Computer Weekly: “Horizon is still glitchy and often works very slowly.”

The Post Office Horizon contract the suppliers will replace is believed to have been Fujitsu’s most lucrative ever contract in the UK, earning the Japanese-owned firm more than £2.5bn over its 25-plus years duration. Nearly 1,000 subpostmasters were wrongly convicted after Horizon erroneously recorded accounting errors caused by bugs in the software, and a further 10,000 are eligible to claim compensation after the Post Office forced them to make good on phantom losses out of their own pockets.

In February, Post Office chief technology officer Paul Anastassi told Computer Weekly that Fujitsu would be completely removed from its Post Office contract by the summer of 2027, and its Horizon system would be “eradicated” earlier than planned.

The Post Office scandal was first exposed by Computer Weekly in 2009, when it revealed the stories of seven subpostmasters and the problems they suffered due to Horizon, which led to the most widespread miscarriage of justice in British history (see below timeline of Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009).

Timeline: Computer Weekly articles about the scandal since 2009

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