British MPs and peers are questioning the government's decision to continue accepting bids for large-scale IT contracts from Fujitsu, despite the Japanese supplier's previous pledge to stop bidding.
Following the widespread publicity around the Post Office Horizon scandal in January 2024, Fujitsu, which supplied the faulty computer system, volunteered to stop bidding for UK public sector contracts until the public inquiry had completed.
At the time, the Japanese computer giant was in the process of bidding for a contract to build Northern Ireland's new land registry system. It won the £125 million contract in April 2025.
In letters to the Cabinet Office in January and February 2024, Fujitsu said it would "only bid for work with a new government customer if asked to do so." The Northern Ireland government has confirmed it did not ask Fujitsu to continue bidding.
A number of members of the House of Commons and the House of Lords – the UK's two legislative chambers – have since called on the government to clarify Fujitsu's role in public sector contracting while a public inquiry into the Horizon scandal continues.
Horizon is an EPOS and back-end finance system for thousands of Post Office branches around the UK, first implemented by ICL, a UK technology company majority-owned by Fujitsu in the 1990s and later taken over by the Japanese giant. From 1999 until 2015, around 736 subpostmasters were wrongfully convicted of fraud when errors in the system were to blame, destroying the lives of many involved. While a number of convictions have been quashed in the courts, 60 people died before just seeing any sort of justice served. A statutory inquiry into the mass miscarriage of justice launched in 2021 is expected to publish its first report in July.
Fujitsu has yet to contribute to victim compensation, although it has accepted a "moral obligation" to do so. The Register understands that MPs and Lords are concerned that the company continues to win and bid for lucrative government contracts while the compensation question remains open.
In June, Conservative MP Mark Garnier tabled a Parliamentary question asking Chancellor of the Exchequer Rachel Reeves if the Treasury had assessed Fujitsu's suitability to bid for the Trader Support Service (TSS), a seven-year, £370 million contract to support a digital platform and call center to handle trading arrangements over the Northern Ireland border, "in the context of the failures of the Horizon system."
Fujitsu is the incumbent supplier of the system, and has been awarded around £500 million since 2020.
In response to Garnier, exchequer secretary James Murray said that contracting opportunities were "available to any economic operator that is able to meet the requirements of the procurement in compliance with the Public Contracts Regulations 2015."
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