A Cabinet Office report called Organising for Digital Delivery has found that the government spends half of its £4.7 billion IT budget patching out of date systems.
The report said that the UK government spends £2.3 billion a year on patching legacy IT systems, making up half of the £4.7bn it spends on IT each year.
The UK government could spend £13- £22 billion over the next five years on maintaining its outdated IT systems.
The so-called “technical debt” racked up by the government stems from its use of “obsolete technical platforms” using programming languages that are no longer widely supported.
Some IT systems fail to meet “even the minimum of cybersecurity standards”.
The Home Office, which takes the lion’s share of the government’s IT spend, has failed to retire any of its 12 legacy systems, despite three to four years of effort to scrap them and being well aware of the risks in using them, the report says.
“This routine discipline is not currently in place in any systematic way across the civil service. GDS (Government Digital Service) put in place a performance management system in 2012 but this has fallen into abeyance with only 12 per cent of services currently providing updates, and even the supporting technology is now obsolete and viewed as vulnerable to cyberattack,” the report adds.
While business leaders in the commercial sector are increasingly seeing technology as a crucial asset, the report observes an “under-developed level of digital expertise” among civil service leaders.
The report makes eight recommendations to make the UK government’s digital services “the best in the world” claiming that the ambition is “entirely achievable”.
