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DOCUMENT - 3
DRAFT - IN STRICTEST CONFIDENCE AND SUBJECT TO LEGAL PRIVILEGE
GLO COMMUNICATIONS — HORIZON ISSUES JUDGMENT
VIDEO SCRIPT — POL COLLEAGUES (Delivered by Mark Davies tbc)
You'll have seen that today a second Judgment in the Post Office Group Litigation has been
handed down by the High Court. This Judgment focuses on our Horizon system and it’s part
of the preliminary stages of the very complex, long-running legal case to resolve a number
of individual claims by mainly former postmasters.
The Judgment raises a number of issues [and criticisms] but what I want to do straight away
is reassure you about that we can have confidence in the overall robustness of Horizon and
that it compares well with systems used by other retail and financial services companies
each day. Both independent experts, for Post Office and the claimants in the case, on
opposite sides of the litigation, confirmed this.
It’s also important to underline that the products and services that Post Office’s provide
every day to millions of customers are not affected by the litigation
We take the Judgment extremely seriously .... Add specific judgment issues here and our
response.
Before I talk a bit more about all the work we’ve doing to improve, it’s important to
remember Horizon processes around 47 million transactions a week, more than £60 billion
worth a year. These are reconciled every day, every, month, every year, with the systems of
major organisations including high street banks, utility companies and Government
departments, giving confidence in the many products and services we provide.
Of course no system can ever be said to be perfect and we’re working as hard as ever to
make improvements. In the past [x], months, working with our supplier, Fujitsu, we have
taken actions which include strengthening the ways the system is monitored and software
bugs identified and fixed when they do arise. We’re also implementing some design
changes to further reduce the likelihood of human errors. Overall more than [100?] changes
are being made in a comprehensive programme of improvements, closely involving
postmasters.
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But what the Judgment underlines [very strongly] is that we must continue to do better in
the ways in which we support postmasters to operate branches. We need to make it easier
for problems to be avoided in the first place but if there is an issue we need to help get it
resolved more quickly. You will already have seen, I hope, communications about all the
improvements underway to do this.
Our new field team structure is helping to build stronger relationships with our postmasters.
[We’ve also made/ we are making] changes to the NBSC, now the Branch Support Centre,
working more closely with the IT helpline team. Changes in the way the centre works
means we can investigate concerns more quickly and escalate them if needed. [We’re
getting good feedback from branches on this].
We’re significantly improving our training —making sure it’s better aligned to the needs of
postmasters — classroom, online, in branch , including refresher training.
Our new loss prevention team is in place to help better protect branches from external
crime and security threats and they’re also refining some of our processes to help avoid
human errors.
On all of this we’re getting the input of postmasters and this is incredibly important.
Serving customers every day, handling millions of transactions, they are best placed to tell
us what makes it easier to operate branches effectively.
I hope that I have given you confidence that we are learning lessons, we are listening and
we are improving.
If you want to know more, please get in touch [comms email visible] and we’ll be happy to
help.