Government spends £2.3bn a year on patching outdated IT systems, report finds

Cabinet Office report warns UK government could spend up to £22bn over the next five years on outdated legacy systems

The UK government spends almost half of its total IT budget on patching outdated IT systems, a recent report has found.

A Cabinet Office report called Organising for Digital Delivery has found that the UK government spends £2.3bn a year on patching legacy IT systems, making up almost half of the £4.7bn it spends on IT each year.

The report warns that the UK government could spend £13bn to £22bn over the next five years on maintaining its outdated IT systems.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.

The report adds that 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.

Meanwhile the civil service has neglected to implement standard operational performance monitoring practices which are widely used in leading public and private sector organisations.

"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.

Another criticism from the report was an apparent lack of "technical fluency" among senior civil service leadership.

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".

The recommendations include building mechanisms that place citizen needs "at the centre of decision-making and product design", making individual departments more accountable and hiring a government chief digital officer and head of function to work across departments.

A spokesperson from the Cabinet Office told the BBC that the government has accepted the report's recommendations.

"We are reducing our reliance on legacy IT, moving away from costly, insecure and unreliable technology and laying the foundations for future digital transformation."