Why Horizon is just the tip of the iceberg for Britain’s crumbling IT

“Horizon is an extreme example of this but from a technical point of view there are other systems that are similarly parlous and poorly designed,” says Mike Bracken, who ran the Government Digital Service and is a founding partner at the Public Digital consultancy. “The other key issue with Horizon is that the Post Office was judge and jury and could choose to prosecute.” Britain was once a world leader in major IT systems. Helen Margetts, a professor of internet and society at the Oxford Institute and director of the Alan Turing Institute’s Public Policy Programme, says this separated Britain from many other countries modernising their own systems. The companies promised to take over all the misery and risk of these great big contracts.” Very public failures such as the fiasco around the National Programme for IT at the NHS, combined with pressure on the public finances, led the Coalition government to declare in 2010 that the era of “mega IT contracts” had come to an end.