What is the point of the MTD? Tony Monger dissects the initiative and fails to come up with a single positive.
Like a lot of the British public, I found myself glued to the television watching Mr Bates v the Post Office, which tells the story of the Horizon software scandal. In turn astonishing, frustrating, angering and heartbreaking, a persistent theme throughout is the supposed infallibility of the Horizon system. One comment by the head of Fujitsu allegedly compared Horizon with the imperviousness of Fort Knox – although the man who made that comment now explains that he was talking in relation to its impregnability to “cyber and physical security”.
Of course, setting aside the despicable manner in which the Post Office acted against its employees, the primary lesson of the Horizon scandal is that computer programmes are not infallible. But it seems that there came a point relatively early on in the process where one of the motivating factors for the Post Office was the amount of money that they had already spent on developing Horizon. Scrapping Horizon when they had already spent tens and tens of millions upon it – if not hundreds of millions – was too horrible to contemplate. So they kept on with it. And, tragically, they even kept on with it when they had learnt that it didn’t work.
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