Putney's Shameful Link with the Post Office Scandal
Fujitsu's contract was inherited from a locally based company
The original ICL headquarters in Putney in the seventies. Picture: Roy Pedlar
January 18, 2024
As a town we must hang our heads in shame. For the Post Office scandal which involves so much of British institutional life starts in Putney. For between 1968-98 the headquarters of ICL, Britain’s then computer giant, were in architect Richard Siefert’s award winning tower blocks on either side of the river. Now it is a Travel Lodge and upmarket apartments.
ICL was set up by amalgamating all the best of the British electronics industry including International Computers and Tabulators, bits of GEC, Ferranti and English Electric. They were put together to compete with IBM and Hewlett Packard. It was the same logic that amalgamated the car industry into British Leyland.
Despite teething problems, bolstered by government contracts (Post Office, Inland Revenue, MOD, Dept of Works) and communist Eastern Europe’s desire to buy non-American computers. it prospered. At one point the company employed 28,000 in 70 countries. In 1976 ICL was awarded the Queens Award for Exports. But competition hit hard as did the switch away from main frames and by 1981 it was making a £18m loss.
New ideas and investors were needed and Japanese industry was in the ascendency. Fujitsu stepped up and by 1990 had a majority stake and in 1998 ICL vacated its Putney headquarters and moved to Bracknell. ICL ceased to exist in 2002. Fujitsu inherited and continues to do so all of ICL’s government contacts and contracts including the Post Office.
As the Putney Society’s History of Putney and Roehampton states,” Both buildings are eminently successful in their present roles, but both are metaphors for the decline and fall of UK’s industrial base.”
And now shame.
Hugh Thompson
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