The UK Post Office is spending another £54 million on IT services with Accenture to take over the PO's back office services and assist in future migration efforts.
The contract notice published on February 18 said Accenture will take on the mainly cloud-based “Back Office Application Support and Modernisation” work, excluding the still present Horizon IT system.
The contract covering the corporate system for the Post Office's more than 11,500 branches was directly awarded and runs from April 2026 until June 2029.
Accenture will be responsible for managing "steady-state operations," such as supporting finance and ERP systems, human resources and process automation. The contact also covers help with "application modernisation, migration or decommissioning" as the Post Office's technology landscape "evolves."
The only company for the job
Explaining the decision to skip the tendering process, an earlier transparency notice said Accenture is the only supplier capable of delivering the services in the time period specified because of their prior knowledge of the systems.
"The direct award is both necessary and proportionate, and limited to the period required for Post Office Ltd to prepare and conduct a competitive procurement for future service transformation," the transparency notice states.
However, the Post Office posted a pre-tender notice for a contract with the same name back in December 2024. That contract split the potential work into five lots to support SAP applications, databases, ServiceNow, RPA/BluePrism, and Azure infrastructure.
A Post Office spokesperson told The Stack the February 18 Accenture contract was a new contract to extend work the company was already doing for the Post Office. Of the 2024 notice, they said prior information notices does not guarantee work will go to tender.
The new contract notice says Accenture's service is designed so that the Post Office does not need to "directly operate or support" underlying infrastructure.
The Post Office did not respond to a question on vendor lock-in concerns.
Accenture and Horizon
Accenture has taken on tens of millions of pounds worth of work for the Post Office in the last decade. In 2025 it was one of 12 suppliers in a £40 million IT Capabilities framework and one of 15 for a £24 million Digital Capabilities framework.
Previous contracts also included support for the failed attempt to migrate off the Fujitsu-built IT system at the centre of the Horizon scandal.
The consultancy won a £27 million contract to support a “Strategic Platform Modernisation Programme” in 2022 before the project was abandoned less than a year later over “fundamental technical challenges.”
In 2025, two tenders worth a collective £815 million were posted by the Post Office for overseeing the Horizon data centres in Belfast and the supply of off-the-shelf technology for its digital transformation.
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