Hi all

Apologies for the late delivery. We’ve had major technical problems.

Here is the transcript of today’s trial

Here are Torstein Godeseth’s 3 (three) witness statements.

Here is Andy Dunks’ witness statement

Here is David Johnson’s witness statement.

Here are the live tweets from this morning

Here are the live tweets from this afternoon

I am sorry you are not going to get a blog post about what happened in court today.

I will try to write something tomorrow morning.

You think you’re having a bad time

My post-court evening was taken up helping a dear, new and lovely person Kim Evans get to grips with the platforms I am emailing and blogging to you with.

Kim is brilliant and she will take over the running of this account in the w/c 8 April, when the claimants have the chance to cross-examine the Post Office’s IT expert.

Kim spent the last hour of today live tweeting about the situation in court under my username.Then everything died. I am not quite sure why.

Just as we were about to press “publish” on some work we had done, there was an error.

A human error which was due to a system fault. Or possibly vice versa. Either way I encouraged Kim to press a button and she pressed the wrong one and a couple of hours work went down the tube. At least all we lost was time, and not money.

Mailerlite working as it should.

Who cares, right?

Kim is brilliant and so after we’d lost what she and I had written, she took the time to re-write her experience of what happened today as she made her way back to Hastings on her phone. I have pasted it below:

“Today was my first trip to the Rolls Building, to shadow Nick reporting on this trial. There was some interesting, and at times (to my non-techy mind) impenetrable evidence regarding the rollout of Horizon online. Today’s witness, Mr Torstein Godeseth (Fujitsu’s chief Horizon archtiect) agreed in answer to Mr Green QCs suggestion that the HOL rollout was a ‘not uncontroversial project’’.

Mr Green, for the claimants, quoted from a report that said the existing Horizon architecture was ‘robust’ but not suitable for current business and technology drivers in use today, with another report referring to Horizon online, saying its legacy architecture was being difficult to change – a system ‘wrapped up in barbed wire’.

Mr Green pointed out to Mr Godeseth that Horizon online’s software issues didn’t exactly leap out of his witness statement. Mr Godeseth said he was giving an ‘overview’ of the system.

Later, a request by the Claimants’ independent IT expert Jason Coyne was discussed. He had asked for key documents to be provided to him based on his assumption that a problem management process had been implemented, and the resultant data fed back to Fujitsu.

An internal Post Office document refers to Post Office objecting to this request – data was not available without detailed analysis, at disproportionate effort and cost. The records referred to and requested did not exist.

Finally, evidence was heard about a tool developed for Horizon Online allowing FSC to make and audit changes. A warning referred to this powerful tool having inherent risks, with the potential for causing serious problems in branch databases.

To date, the Post Office has maintained that this tool has only ever been used once, but Mr Green appears to have been suggesting that it was used on at least one other occasion in 2010 in relation to a doubling up of a transfer out from £4k to £8k. TG had no knowledge of this issue either whilst working for the Post Office or Fujitsu.”

Kim is good

Kim is going to be in court w/c 8 April for the claimants’ cross examination of Dr Worden, the Post Office’s independent IT expert.

I am going to be back in court tomorrow for the last day in a while.

Thank you for your patience.

Nick

Please feel free to forward this email. The more people who read it, the more people find out about what is the biggest trial going through the UK courts right now.