After 25 years in operation, the infamously faulty IT system seemingly requires tech assistance until around the end of the current decade, with suppliers sought to support Belfast hosting facilities
The Post Office plans to go to market in summer 2026 to award £120m in contracts for “ongoing development” services and datacentre support for the Horizon accounting software.
Recently published commercial documents reveal that, in just over a year and a half’s time, the Post Office is planning to issue tenders for three discrete contracts related to Horizon.
The first of these, which will be valued at £45m plus VAT, covers various support services related to datacentre facilities based in Belfast and operated by Fujitsu; the Post Office had previously intended to vacate these environments and migrate to public cloud but opted to “discontinue” this programme during the 2022/23 year.
Instead, in June 2026 suppliers will be invited to bid for a contract covering the provision of “onsite support… including datacentre building, physical security and datacentre operations [such as] patching, hardware upgrades, incident resolution, systems management including event monitoring, software distribution, availability management, [and] problem management”.
As well as the core Belfast hosting sites, these services will also be required at “some test environments at other locations in the UK [including] Stevenage and Bracknell”.
The second of the two deals set to open for bids in 2026 – which will be worth about £12m – will be dedicated to “network services related to the datacentres… [including] LAN, security perimeter (firewalls, proxy servers, radius server) and datacentre interconnects, network management – including incident management, capacity management and break-fix support for network hardware”.
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The final of the trio of Horizon support engagements will cover the provision of “application support”.
An early engagement notice adds: “Post Office are seeking a supplier to execute Horizon application support and ongoing development. Some of the key activities involved include Horizon application third- and fourth-line software support and fix, incident and problem management, managing the development, change cycle and testing for [the] codebase supporting Horizon (primarily Java), Oracle database support, and administration and investigation and resolution of new software incidents within branch and/or central Horizon infrastructure.”
This deal will be worth around £54m, once tax is included, meaning that the three contracts will come with a collective value of £120m.
The procurement for the trio of contracts is set to take place around the same time as, after many delays, the replacement system for Horizon is set to begin its rollout to 11,700 branches. This process that will take about two and half years and will reach its conclusion by the end of 2028, according to evidence given to the Horizon inquiry this month by recently departed Post Office chief transformation officer Chris Brocklesby.
No details on the intended length of the three Horizon support contracts is provided in the engagement notice. PublicTechnology contacted the Post Office requesting comment on how long the deals – and the need to keep Horizon in operation – will last. We had not heard back at time of going to press.
Suppliers interested in finding out more about one or more of the contracts is invited to express their interest and sign a non-disclosure agreement – a requirement for finding out more details.
Having been implemented in 1999, faults with the Horizon system led to almost 1,000 sub-postmasters being wrongfully prosecuted for fraud or false accounting in what is typically regarded as the biggest miscarriage of justice in British legal history. Interest in the scandal has grown following the broadcast earlier this year of a major TV dramatization – since when governments in Westminster and Holyrood have expedited programmes and legislation to effect mass exonerations and financially compensate those wrongfully convicted as a result of the defective technology platform.
