‘I told Blair to cancel Horizon in 1998 – I could see it was unreliable’ (Telegraph).
For the hundreds of victims of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal, a recently-unearthed memo from 1998 must be almost too painful to read.
The then Prime Minister, Sir Tony Blair, was warned that Horizon was “flawed” and that an “unsatisfactory” deal with suppliers Fujitsu would leave the government “dependent on a hugely expensive, inflexible, inappropriate and possibly unreliable system”. Fatefully, Blair went ahead with Horizon anyway, and we all know what came next.
The man who wrote that memo, Sir Geoff Mulgan, is now helping Sir Keir Starmer to prepare for government, and the Labour leader would do well to listen to him. Mulgan worries that political leaders still have too little grip on science and technology, and that mistakes like Horizon are still happening around the world.
“I did recommend cancelling it,” he says of Horizon, “and then tried to look at some of the lessons to be learnt – there was a gap in capability in the British Government of people with an understanding of technology.
“The Government’s very strong on finance, especially the Treasury, obviously strong on things like law, but I was often the only person in throom who had any tech background. And I was definitely not a deep expert on Horizon-type projects, but even I could see that it was unreliable, likely to go wrong.
“These were monstrously big projects, which didn’t involve the users at all in the design process. Even the Post Office management didn’t get to see the software. Blair, to his credit, did at least, say ‘surely we need a reassurance that the technology will work’. He was given that reassurance by the then Department of Trade and Industry. So he asked the right question, but didn’t get the right answer from the system.”
Mulgan reacted “with horror” as the
Post Office scandal unfolded over the course of 20 years, adding: “I think this is a topic where guilt is very widely shared. Certainly people from all the political parties made wrong decisions at certain points. The Government machine should also be held to account. The Civil Service got this wrong.
“For me, the crucial thing is not just that justice has to be done, but the right lessons are learnt. And I’m still not quite sure that process is yet happening. Because we will probably be in a blame festival rather than lesson learning. The same applies to the Covid Inquiry.”
Mulgan, 62, is the sort of person who seems to have lived a dozen lives in the time it has taken the rest of us to live one. In his various incarnations, he has been a trainee Buddhist monk, a roadie, an encyclopaedia salesman, a BBC reporter, a local government official, an author, a PhD student, a lecturer, a think-tank director, a Downing Street adviser and more.
He is currently a professor of collective intelligence, public policy and social innovation at University College London, and he advises governments all over the world as a sort of freelance problem solver. After he founded the cross-party think-tank Demos in 1993, his counsel was sought by Blair, Sir John Major, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and Boris Johnson.
With Starmer on a seemingly
unstoppable path to power, he may need all the help Mulgan can give him.
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