Ex-Post Office chief exec wanted to reduce cost of Horizon system

Thank you. As soon as what you said, you refer at the end of 90 to the system being repurposed in a way to automate the entire back office of the branch network. And you said with hindsight, Horizon should not have been repurposed in that way. It’s become evident that it was not fit for purpose. At the time. Were you given any impression or any understanding that the repurposing of the system? Had a negative effect on the actual end product. No one has specifically mentioned it, but I would. Easily have expected it. I had been the IT director of Midland Bank and we had rewritten the entire retail banking system for the bank. And there was only one way to do that. It was not to try and remake the elephant all in one go. It was to bite it in tiny pieces. Were you skeptical then of the? The the, as you described it, the repurposing of definitely. Did you do anything on the Did you do anything because of your scepticism? Yes. What did you do well? It was pretty obvious that Horizon was not going to be written off. Nor was it going to be closed down. No one would have accepted that in government or indeed in the wider surroundings. So I made it very clear very early on that we had to do a number of things with Horizon. The first thing was to reduce its cost, because remember, my primary activity was to try and keep this thing afloat. So we needed to reduce its cost to something like you would normally expect a company to be paying for its IT. Now we were paying well above what you could have expected and normally that would have been 15% of non interest expenditure. It’s sort of a you know rule of thumb sort of thing. So I basically said we must reduce the costs of Horizon and at the same time we must begin to think now about how are we going to replace it within the contractual term which was basically five years hence and that’s the amount of time you really need. To think about how you replace a system this size and scope and complexity.