Mr Bates vs the Post Office

[bluethrunthru]

Jake Berry is a dick

 

[BringBackSwales]

I wonder how many more sub postmasters weren’t in the nearly 800 prosecuted but who gave the post office their own money to make up shortfalls that weren’t there, potentially thousands of them with thousands of pounds each handed over to the post office? This could be a lot bigger than currently thought?

Also is Horizon still in place or has it been replaced?

 

[Stephen230]

I didn’t know anything about the bicycle thing but now you mention it I’ve not seen a postie on a bike for years!

What was the possible rationale behind that?!?

Bikes are cheap, reliable, zero emissions and are mostly immune to traffic. I can’t think of a single better vehicle for local posties to use for deliveries.

They used to have one bag that they could throw over their shoulder or stick on the front of the bike. And a round that took them maybe an hour or so.

Now they all seem to be dragging some huge truck around with them from the crack of dawn until early evening.

Couldn’t fit one of those fuckers on a bike.

 

[Prestwich_Blue]

As a software engineer for 34 years, I find it ludicrous that the police, the government and the CPS have so much faith in the fact that a computer system is infallible that they’d rather convict 100s of innocent people than consider the obvious explanation.

It beggars belief.

I notice that Fujitsu execs are up before the inquiry next week, so it will be interesting to see how they defend their system and their actions.

I've got a similar length in the IT industry to you, as a project manager and business analyst, and I'll go further.

In my 35 years, I've been lucky to work on some great projects. Six or seven major IT/Business transformation projects including two of the biggest and most ambitious in Western Europe. Never once have I seen a system implemented that didn't have initial problems of some sort.

Those might be bugs, requirements that were specified incorrectly or weren't specified at all, requirements that had to be dropped from scope in order to meet cost or time constraints, things that worked perfectly in the pre-production environment then failed in production. All sorts of reasons.

This week at my current company, we've just loaded the first mortgage case on our new platform but there's problems in a couple of areas, plus we need a host of manual processes to support that mortgage application through to completion and disbursement of the funds.

Last year I worked for the DWP, and was working on their payment system, one of the biggest in the world, when the Queen died. I wasn't involved in the 'London Bridge' operation but the colleague I worked with very closely was. They'd practiced that relentlessly, particularly as the late Queen got older. Because of the bank holiday being declared at short notice, we had to bring forward all payments that were due on that day or would be in BACS for payment on the next two days. When they finished and things got back to business as usual, she said there were things that had not worked that they hadn't considered in practice runs.

I've implemented a new system at 9am and had to take it down at 9:15am, as we still had a test table in there, rather than the production one. City's launch of digital tickets was another example that had loads of issues until they got on top of them.

I don't know what the implementation strategy was for Horizon but I'd expect a pilot roll-out to a small number of sub-post offices and careful monitoring, involving recording all transactions manually and reconciling those to the system. Partly because you're never sure what real users, who won't have the same experience, training or knowledge as the people who worked on it, are going to do.

There's no way a system as complex as Horizon was ever going to be perfect first time.

 

[Mike N]

Jake Berry is a dick

He’s much worse than that.

 

[MillionMilesAway]

Jake Berry is a dick

Jess Phillips seems to have been enjoying that.

I cannot fathom why Berry doesn't think 'hang on, Hislop's been going on about this for donkey's years, maybe I shouldn't try to flannel at him'. It is very rare that anyone goes up against him on one of his specialist subjects and gets the better of him.

The anger when Berry said that Hislop 'claimed to love' the series was palpable.

 

[bluethrunthru]

Jess Phillips seems to have been enjoying that.

I cannot fathom why Berry doesn't think 'hang on, Hislop's been going on about this for donkey's years, maybe I shouldn't try to flannel at him'. It is very rare that anyone goes up against him on one of his specialist subjects and gets the better of him.

The anger when Berry said that Hislop 'claimed to love' the series was palpable.

Jake Berry is a prick with zero political nowse - the fact that he has risen so fat in the Tory Party just indicates how shit their "talent" pool is. Looking like an epic loss at the GE then a R/W move to oblivion

 

[remember arthur mann]

Whilst Sunak pretends he is the knight in shining armour, they have had 14 years plus knowing this issue existed and just kicked it into the long grass.

Heads in government should roll too imo

Literally I hope. Where the fooks Cromwell when you need him.

 

[cleavers]

Also is Horizon still in place or has it been replaced?

Still their software in use, hopefully better used today.

It's a terrible story, the woman who gave up her CBE will be prosecuted, and fujitsu should be too.

It's a real shit show.

 

[cleavers]

Whilst Sunak pretends he is the knight in shining armour, they have had 14 years plus knowing this issue existed and just kicked it into the long grass.

Heads in government should roll too imo

This is on multiple governments to be fair, shouldn't be political.