You know the feeling. You watch a company screw over innocent people, get caught red-handed, and then — nothing. No real consequence. No change. Just a slow, quiet return to business as usual.
That’s exactly what’s happening with Fujitsu. The same company that helped the Post Office convict 700 sub-postmasters using faulty Horizon software is still sitting pretty inside the UK government’s most lucrative IT contracts. MPs are now demanding answers. But here’s the truth no one wants to say out loud: their outrage is a performance. The reality is they can’t afford to fire Fujitsu.
Let me walk you through the numbers. Fujitsu is currently bidding on a £5 billion government framework. That’s not a typo. Five. Billion. Pounds. For a company that admitted to bugs in its software, that destroyed lives, and that has only committed to a fraction of the compensation owed. The compensation, by the way, is still being slowly rolled out — and no one knows how much Fujitsu itself will actually pay versus the taxpayer.
And Paula Vennells? The former Post Office chief who oversaw the scandal? Still walking free, still collecting her pension, still facing no real accountability. The system is designed to protect the powerful.
But the real reason Fujitsu remains untouchable isn’t corruption or favouritism. It’s something far more structural — and far more depressing. The UK’s domestic IT sector was hollowed out in the 1990s, and Fujitsu owns the last vestiges of it. They bought ICL, the former British computer giant, and a string of other companies. Today, there simply aren’t enough alternative suppliers that can handle projects of this scale. The government is trapped.
One commenter on the original article put it bluntly: ‘The problem for the UK is Fujitsu owns the last vestiges of the UK IT scene. ICL and a bunch of others were all bought out by them in the early 90s. There aren’t many companies that are able to bid on that scale.’
Think about what that means. A foreign company now controls critical national infrastructure. And because we let our own industry collapse, we have no choice but to keep paying them — even after they collaborated in a national scandal. Fujitsu isn’t just too big to fail. It’s too big to ban.
This isn’t about one bad actor. It’s about what happens when a country prioritises short-term cost savings over long-term strategic capability. The UK outsourced its IT sovereignty to the cheapest bidder, and now the bill is coming due — in money, in trust, in justice.
So when you see MPs demanding answers, don’t hold your breath. The questions are just theatre. The real answer is that the system is rigged, and Fujitsu will keep winning contracts until someone rebuilds a domestic industry capable of competing. That’s not a political problem. That’s a decades-long engineering and policy failure. And it won’t be fixed by a few angry tweets.
FAQ
Q: Isn't the government just waiting for legal proceedings to finish before deciding on Fujitsu's contracts?
A: No. The legal proceedings are a sideshow. The real issue is that there are no other vendors capable of handling the scale of government IT contracts. Even if Fujitsu is found criminally liable, the government will have to either keep them or suffer a massive operational breakdown.
Q: What practical difference does this make for the average taxpayer?
A: It means your taxes are directly funding a company that helped destroy innocent lives, and there's no easy way to stop it. The compensation paid to sub-postmasters comes from the same pot of money that Fujitsu's contracts draw from. In effect, the government is paying Fujitsu with one hand and compensating its victims with the other.
Q: Couldn't the government just break up the contracts or bring in overseas competitors?
A: Overseas competitors like IBM, Accenture, or TCS already dominate the UK market, but they face similar scale issues. Breaking up contracts would increase costs and complexity. The real solution is a long-term investment in domestic IT capability — but that would take a decade and a political will that doesn't exist right now.