North Yorkshire post officer manager urges colleagues to report Horizon problems
There are concerns there is still problems with the system
A North Yorkshire sub-postmaster has told us he fears problems with the computer system "horizon" are still there now.
Hundreds of workers were wrongly convicted of theft and false accounting because of the faulty IT software between 1995 and 2015.
But Andrew Hart who runs post offices in Harrogate and Starbeck says they've had problems more recently: " We have to account for every penny so at the end of the day if we balance up and we can’t balance, we've got to find that money now sometimes we can’t find it, but amazingly, sometimes the following day or the day after might, it might be a little hiccup and it reappears."
But you've spent a day or two days frantically trying to find £500 or a £1000, wondering where it’s gone, how it’s gone and how we are going to replace it."
"It's a pressure on the staff because they know that their tills are down, but they are also confident that they’ve done everything right, but we can’t prove it either way, it's a long time and a lot of work to investigate."
What do the Post office say?
A Post Office spokesperson said:
“There have been several versions of Horizon since its introduction in 1999 and the current version of the system, introduced from 2017, was found in the group litigation to be robust, relative to comparable systems. It has been our long-stated intent to replace Horizon with a new cloud-based system for a number of years. Around 250 serving Postmasters are helping make sure the system is fit for the future with an effective and efficient roll-out across the network.
“We are now much more transparent when it comes to alerting Postmasters about bugs with the Horizon system. We also have a number of Postmaster Forums where Postmasters can raise any issues they are having with Horizon. And they can also request an immediate investigation when they are concerned about a discrepancy directly through a button on their Horizon terminal. We’d encourage any Postmaster who is experiencing an issue with Horizon today to raise that with their dedicated Area Manager or via our Branch Support Centre.”