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DOCUMENT —5
DRAFT — IN STRICTEST CONFIDENCE AND SUBJECT TO LEGAL PRIVILEGE
GLO COMMUNICATIONS — HORIZON ISSUES JUDGMENT
L300 CALL SCRIPT [MARK DAVIES TBC]
Audience: L300
Thank you for joining the call this morning/afternoon.
I’ve an important update to share with you about the Group Litigation and the Judgment
from the second trial that was handed down today.
Before I talk about our response, it’s important to remember that a lot of what you
might hear about the trial relates to the ways in which we operated in the past, dating
back to 2000 in some cases —before we became an independent business.
In recent years we’ve changed significantly and improved our culture, processes and
technology. But we are reminded through the litigation that we must do better. We
know there is still a lot more to do and we need to be much faster at doing it. There is
nothing more important to our business than our relationship with our postmasters, the
people delivering our services to customers day-in, day-out and we are fully committed
to supporting and making it easier for them to build thriving businesses.
When we received the first judgment we responded quickly and accelerated the work
that we were doing to change our relationship with postmasters. We’ve made
improvements to provide better support which includes more effective and tailored
training and support for postmasters, an Area Manager supporting every branch, a new
Branch Support Center which works more closely with our IT support team and a new
Loss Prevention team to protect postmasters and help them run their business more
compliantly.
The second trial, known as the Horizon Issues trial, was about technical matters
concerning Post Office’s Horizon computer system and as mentioned the judgment was
handed down today.
We take the Judgment extremely seriously and before I talk about some of the points
highlighted by the Judge, it’s really important to underline that the Court’s findings do
not affect the products and services we provide for our millions of customers through
our 11,500 Post Office branches
... Add specific judgment issues here and our response.
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As mentioned we’ve made a lot of changes already and in recent years we’ve invested in
and improved technology by installing new IT equipment in every branch and
transformed our back office systems which handle £60 billion a year in financial
transactions. And this investment remains a priority
We’ve also strengthened and have a more transparent processes with Fujitsu, our
Horizon supplier, for identifying and fixing software bugs
We should be reassured that the view of both independent expert witnesses who gave
evidence in the litigation is that all the indications are that Horizon is robust, comparing
well with similar systems across retail and financial service sectors which have to be
highly reliable.
This is further supported by the fact that the system has been used by 500,000
postmasters and colleagues since its introduction and around 47 million transactions
every week are successfully processed for customers.
Clearly no system can ever be said to be perfect. That’s why its performance is
continually monitored and we are working as hard as ever to make improvements
wherever we can.
Keeping our postmasters updated and informed about any changes is extremely
important at this time. Our Area Managers will be talking to Postmasters and answering
their questions over the coming weeks, postmasters can also email us directly.
We will keep you updated of developments and there will also be information available
on the intranet to share with your teams which we will send out after the call.
This news may be unsettling. You will probably see criticism — some of it very strong — in
the media and beyond. Please don’t hesitate to ask questions of anyone in the senior
leadership team or you can email our Communications Team