The Business and Trade Committee has published a follow-up report on the Post Office Horizon scandal, calling for legally binding timeframes in Post Office legislation and pressing Fujitsu to make immediate payments to victims — one year after the committee's previous report identified structural failings that, by its own assessment, remain largely unaddressed.

Liam Byrne chairs the committee and has led the parliamentary investigation. The follow-up report's publication comes after Fujitsu executive Paul Patterson was questioned by MPs in January 2026 over the company's continued refusal to name a compensation figure, drawing accusations from committee members that Fujitsu had acted as a "parasite" on the public sector. The committee estimates Fujitsu's liability to victims at £2 billion.

Progress on compensation has been slow relative to the scale of the wrongdoing. As of 31 January 2025, approximately £663 million had been paid to over 4,300 claimants across four schemes — the Horizon Shortfall Scheme, the Group Litigation Order scheme, the Overturned Convictions scheme, and the Suspension Remuneration Review. The Horizon Shortfall Scheme alone has distributed £315 million of that total. Against a universe of sub-postmasters wrongly prosecuted or financially penalised over roughly two decades, those figures represent a fraction of the eventual liability.

The political pressure has coincided with a contractual reality that still raises eyebrows in Westminster: in November 2025, the Post Office agreed to pay Fujitsu a further £41 million to extend its use of the Horizon system until March 2027. The committee's evidence session in January 2026 brought that arrangement into sharp focus, with MPs pressing Patterson on how the company could continue to benefit commercially from a contract underpinning the very system at the heart of the scandal while declining to quantify its own financial responsibility to those harmed by it.

The demand for legally binding timeframes is the committee's sharpest legislative ask. Voluntary commitments and ministerial assurances have not, in the committee's view, produced the pace or transparency that victims require. Embedding statutory deadlines into Post Office legislation would shift the enforcement mechanism from parliamentary pressure — which is considerable but ultimately advisory — to the courts.

Whether the government moves on that recommendation will depend partly on how much political capital ministers are willing to spend on a scandal that has already consumed years of parliamentary time. Fujitsu's posture on compensation is the more intractable variable. The company has significant UK public-sector contracts beyond Post Office, and the committee's £2 billion estimate, if translated into a formal negotiated settlement, would represent one of the largest corporate liability payments arising from an IT system failure in British legal history. Fujitsu has not publicly accepted that figure.

The broader institutional failure documented across successive reports is not simply one of corporate conduct. The Post Office, operating as a government-owned entity, prosecuted sub-postmasters using Horizon data it had been warned was unreliable. The criminal justice system processed those prosecutions without adequate scrutiny. Exonerations have come slowly, and the compensation architecture — spread across four separate schemes with different eligibility criteria and administrators — adds friction at precisely the point where the system should be reducing it. The committee's call for statutory timeframes is, at its core, a recognition that the existing architecture has not compelled urgency from anyone with the ability to write cheques.

For practitioners in public procurement, financial regulation, and parliamentary accountability, the Horizon case continues to function as a live stress test. It tests whether parliamentary committees can extract binding commitments from companies that are simultaneously government contractors and liable parties. It tests whether statutory compensation frameworks can be designed to move faster than the litigation they are meant to replace. And it tests whether a government-owned enterprise can be held to the same standards of corporate accountability that a private firm would face. On all three counts, the committee's follow-up report suggests the answers are not yet satisfactory.