Horizon

 The latest reports from the judicial inquiry into the Post Office IT scandal confirm my suspicions about the roots of the disaster. Having concluded the part of the inquiry which exonerated hundreds of sub-postmasters of theft and false accounting, and put those who have survived in line for monetary compensation (though at the time of writing it is not clear how much of this has been paid), the legal beagles have moved on to the technical part of the inquiry: what was it about the Horizon system that caused it to generate the fallacious accounts which were used as evidence. 

It is clear from the evidence so far that the Horizon system was lashed up with no clear design plan, no standards and no testing strategy. Sadly, this product of Thatcher-Major outsourcing was not reviewed by the Blair government when it came into power. It was not too late in 1997 to pause the development and thoroughly recast it before any harm was done. 

For more, see Private Eye and Computer Weekly magazines.