I told Blair to cancel Horizon in 1998 – even I could see it was likely to go wrong’
Sir Geoff Mulgan, adviser to multiple PMs, explains how the process was flawed – and why the winner of the next election needs to ‘a reset’

Gordon Rayner,
ASSOCIATE EDITOR
26 January 2024 • 6:00am

For the hundreds of victims of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal, a recently-unearthed memo from 1998 must be almost too painful to read.

The then Prime Minister, Sir Tony Blair, was warned that Horizon was “flawed” and that an “unsatisfactory” deal with suppliers Fujitsu would leave the government “dependent on a hugely expensive, inflexible, inappropriate and possibly unreliable system”. Fatefully, Blair went ahead with Horizon anyway, and we all know what came next.*

The man who wrote that memo, Sir Geoff Mulgan, is now helping Sir Keir Starmer to prepare for government, and the Labour leader would do well to listen to him. Mulgan worries that political leaders still have too little grip on science and technology, and that mistakes like Horizon are still happening around the world.*