Sir Geoff Mulgan photographed at his home in central London for The Telegraph on January 24, 2024. Photo: Heathcliff O'Malley
For hundreds of victims of the Horizon Post Office IT scandal, the newly discovered 1998 memo must be too painful to read.
The then prime minister, Sir Tony Blair, was warned that Horizon was «flawed» and that an «unsatisfactory» deal with Fujitsu's suppliers would leave the government «reliant on a hugely expensive, inflexible, inappropriate and possibly unreliable system». Luckily, Blair went ahead with Horizon anyway, and we all know what happened next.
The man who wrote this note, Sir Geoff Mulgan, is now helping Sir Keir Starmer prepare for government, and the Labor leader would do well to listen to him. Mulgan is concerned that political leaders still have too little control over science and technology and that mistakes like Horizon are still happening around the world.
“I did recommend that it be cancelled,” he says of Horizon, “and then tried to look at some of the lessons that should be learned – there was a gap in the capacity of people in the UK government who understood technology.
“The government is very strong in matters of finance, especially the Treasury, obviously strong in matters such as law, but I was often the only person in the room who had any technical background. And I was definitely not an in-depth expert on projects like Horizon, but even I could see that it was unreliable and could go wrong.
“These were monstrously large projects that did not involve users at all in the design process. Even the management of the post office failed to see the program. Blair, to his credit, at least said: «Of course we need assurance that the technology will work.» He received this assurance from the then Ministry of Trade and Industry. This means that he asked the right question, but did not receive the correct answer from the system.”