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The Post Office has halted development of a replacement for its scandal-hit Horizon software as it struggles to overhaul its operations in the wake of one of Britain’s biggest miscarriages of justice.

The state postal group is preparing to install computer equipment in its facilities. This should run on new software from next year, but will now continue to use the old Horizon software from Japan’s Fujitsu.

In a long-running scandal that sparked public outrage this year, more than 900 post office managers were convicted of, among other things, theft, fraud and false accounting between 1999 and 2015, in cases based on erroneous Horizon data.

But the Post Office confirmed to the Financial Times that Horizon’s internal replacement, the multi-million pound New Branch IT program (NBIT), was now “on pause”.

The group was “looking at all different options,” which “could be something other than NBIT,” it added.

The delays highlight the post office’s struggle to put the controversy behind it and regain employee trust. A YouGov survey of 1,483 sub-postmasters published this year found that almost 70 percent had still experienced an unexplained financial shortfall on the Horizon system since 2020.

The Department for Business and Trade has committed £103 million in funding for a Horizon replacement by the end of 2023.

Richard Trinder, chairman of campaign group Voice of the Postmaster, said he had been invited to test new equipment with NBIT this year. But the software “wasn’t fast enough” and could only handle domestic mail, despite being “more intuitive than Horizon,” he added.

Hardware, including new computer monitors, keyboards and printers, has been sitting in a warehouse awaiting NBIT’s development, but will now be installed without it, according to three people familiar with the matter.

“It’s just sitting there in a warehouse that’s outdated, it makes sense (to use the hardware),” one of the people said.

Despite the delays in replacing Horizon, Trinder said the new printers were “a lot faster” and welcomed the decision to roll them out anyway.

“They spent all this money on the new hardware. Our money,” he added.

“So let’s use it, instead of this clumsy nonsense we have at the moment. It’s so slow. It says ‘process, process, process’ and you think: I have a line out the door.”