The tax department’s annual report for FY24 shines a light on work that has taken place in the past three years to fix, decommission and migrate hundreds of core services

HM Revenue and Customs has reported a progress rate of nearly 70% in the department’s ongoing drive to move more than 500 IT services that constitute “critical national infrastructure” out of its legacy datacentres and into a cloud or hosted environment.

In its annual report for the 2023/24 year, the tax department provides details of a programme that has been undertaken over the past three years to move services out of legacy environments. Further remedial work is also being conducted on certain services, while others that are no longer required are being decommissioned.

As of three years ago, HMRC had “600 services hosted on over 7,000 servers in legacy datacentres”, according to the annual report, which indicated that a large proportion of these were critically important platforms.

“By the end of 2023 to 2024, we had successfully migrated 372 of 545 critical services, with 49 remediated,” the annual round-up added. “This included our National Insurance and Pay-As-You-Earn System, which is used by almost 40,000 colleagues and consists of more than 100 million accounts, supporting around 10 million daily transactions. Changes like this enable us to build and run more resilient services for our customers and quickly adapt to meet changes in demand.”

The total of 372 out of 545 of the most important platforms that have been moved equates to a progress rate of 68.25%.

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And, to help deliver ongoing upgrades and transformation, HMRC has created the Technical Health Programme – which, as PublicTechnology recently reported, was formed via the merger of two of its existing merger projects, to create a single £500m initiative to help tackle legacy tech and improve cyber resilience.

The FY24 year-end assessment says that the newly expanded programme will focus on “remediating our highest-priority IT issues”, and will also be supported by “a new technical health measurement methodology [which] is helping us to prioritise” these issues.

Going forward, the department is committed to “take opportunities to replace legacy IT infrastructure wherever possible” – although its work to do so has encountered some challenges.

“We have re-planned some remediation of our retained legacy IT infrastructure to support delivery of other departmental priorities, which has impacted some improvements to our systems, increasing the time it will take for our systems to reach tolerance,” the report says. “We continued improving our IT infrastructure within funding constraints, strengthening the defences of our critical services.”

The document adds: “We run a vast 24/7 operation and have one of the largest and most complex IT estates in the UK, so we are continually modernising and updating our infrastructure to keep pace with changing technology and ensure it remains fit for purpose. To help protect our customers and colleagues, for example, we are focused on migrating our critical national infrastructure to cloud and Crown Hosting, to address potential vulnerabilities within our IT estate and increase the stability, security and overall efficiency of our IT systems, services and platforms.”