Parliament's Business and Trade Committee has released a second report on the Post Office Horizon scandal, pressing for legally binding timeframes in legislation and calling on Fujitsu to settle compensation claims immediately. A year after the committee's first report flagged major structural failures, little has changed.

Liam Byrne chairs the committee and has led the investigation throughout. The timing of this follow-up matters: in January 2026, MPs questioned Fujitsu executive Paul Patterson over the company's refusal to name a compensation figure. Committee members accused Fujitsu of acting like a "parasite" on the public sector. The committee estimates Fujitsu owes victims £2 billion.

The compensation picture so far is modest against the scale of harm. As of 31 January 2025, roughly £663 million had been distributed to over 4,300 claimants through four separate compensation schemes: the Horizon Shortfall Scheme, the Group Litigation Order scheme, the Overturned Convictions scheme, and the Suspension Remuneration Review. The Horizon Shortfall Scheme alone delivered £315 million of that. When measured against decades of wrongful prosecutions and financial penalties affecting sub-postmasters, these amounts remain a fraction of eventual liability.

The contradiction that has drawn scrutiny in Westminster: in November 2025, the Post Office agreed to pay Fujitsu a further £41 million to extend the Horizon contract until March 2027. During the January 2026 evidence session, MPs pressed Patterson on how Fujitsu could continue collecting fees from the very system that caused the scandal while refusing to disclose how much it should pay to fix the damage.

The committee's core demand is straightforward: enshrine compensation deadlines into law rather than relying on voluntary commitments or ministerial promises. Parliamentary pressure is real but ultimately advisory. Statutory deadlines shift enforcement to the courts, where it carries actual weight.

What happens next depends on two variables. First, whether the government has the political appetite to push this legislation through — the scandal has already consumed years of parliamentary attention. Second, whether Fujitsu accepts the committee's £2 billion estimate or negotiates a different figure. Fujitsu holds substantial other public-sector contracts, and a settlement of this size would be among the largest corporate liability payments for an IT system failure in British legal history. The company has not publicly acknowledged the £2 billion figure.

Beyond corporate conduct, the failure reveals systemic problems. The Post Office — a state-owned entity — prosecuted sub-postmasters using Horizon data it knew was unreliable. The criminal justice system processed those cases without sufficient scrutiny. Exonerations have come slowly. The compensation architecture itself, split across four schemes with different rules and administrators, creates friction where the system should be frictionless. The committee's call for statutory timeframes reflects a deeper recognition: existing structures have not forced anyone to move faster or spend money.

The Horizon case now functions as a live test for three core questions in British public life. Can parliamentary committees extract binding commitments from companies that are simultaneously contractors to and liable to the government? Can statutory compensation frameworks move faster than traditional litigation? Can a government-owned enterprise face the same accountability standards as a private firm? The committee's report suggests, on all three fronts, the answer is still no.