Parliament has released a new report on a major scandal involving the Post Office and a technology company called Fujitsu. The scandal caused innocent people to be wrongly prosecuted and lose their livelihoods. Now lawmakers are demanding legal deadlines to pay victims faster.

Here's what happened: For about two decades, the Post Office used a computer system called Horizon to track money at post office branches. But the system was faulty. It gave false readings that made it look like branch managers (called sub-postmasters) had stolen money. Many of these people were prosecuted, convicted, and jailed. Their lives were ruined.

When the problem finally emerged, victims needed compensation. Yet the payments have been slow. As of January 2025, about £663 million had been paid to over 4,300 people through various compensation schemes. The committee running this investigation thinks the victims should receive around £2 billion in total. That's a huge gap.

Fujitsu, the company that built and maintained the Horizon system, refuses to say how much it should pay. In January 2026, lawmakers grilled a Fujitsu executive about this. The executive wouldn't answer. One MP said Fujitsu was acting like a "parasite" — taking money from the government while dodging responsibility for the harm caused.

Here's the twist: even while Fujitsu refuses to pay victims, the Post Office is still paying Fujitsu £41 million a year to keep using the Horizon system until 2027. This infuriated lawmakers, who see it as rewarding the company responsible for the disaster.

Parliament now wants to write deadlines into law. Right now, compensation relies on voluntary promises and pressure from lawmakers — but promises can be broken and pressure only goes so far. If compensation deadlines became law, courts would enforce them. That has real teeth.

Two big unknowns remain. First, will the government actually pass this law? The scandal has already consumed years of parliamentary time. Second, will Fujitsu accept the £2 billion figure or negotiate something lower? Fujitsu handles many government contracts, and paying £2 billion would be one of the biggest corporate liability payouts for an IT failure in British history.

This scandal reveals problems that go wider than one bad company. The Post Office itself — owned by the government — prosecuted people using data it had been warned was broken. The court system didn't scrutinize those prosecutions carefully. The compensation process is split across four different schemes with different rules, making it harder for victims to get money. None of this just happened by accident. It reflects how governments and companies interact, and whether either can be held truly accountable.