Government’s digital and financial centres are working together to support better tracking of costs and performance of systems and services, as well as ensuring money for necessary upgrades remains ringfenced
The Government Digital Service and the Treasury are working together to keep an eye on departments’ spending and, where necessary, step in to prevent money intended to support legacy IT upgrades being spent elsewhere.
The Use of AI in Government report published earlier this year by the Public Accounts Committee found that government faces an “uphill struggle” to deliver adoption of artificial intelligence across the public sector. Among PAC’s many urgent recommendations was an instruction that government should take steps to “track funding allocated for remediation work and take action where progress is slow”. Recent correspondence sent to the committee reveals that, while the target for meeting this recommendation has been delayed – from January to May 2026 – this is because GDS and HM Treasury are working to deliver a more ambitious and rigorous regime to ensure money awarded to upgrade ageing tech and improve resilience is spent as intended.
“We have revised our implementation date… to align with a wider programme of work between GDS and HMT to monitor to prevent the implementation of diversion of funding earmarked for cyber and legacy projects proposed at the spending review,” said the letter from Emran Mian, permanent secretary of the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. “Following spending review settlements, GDS worked with HMT to ringfence key cybersecurity and legacy programmes, and we are in the process of working closely with HMT to ensure that these programmes have outcome-based metrics to ensure accurate and useful reporting in line with broader spending review performance tracking of digital programmes.”
Also delayed, from January to June of next year, is the implementation of a recommendation that government digital experts should “establish an approach for measuring the costs associated with addressing legacy technology, as well as the costs of failing to act”.
Mian, who is now the de facto chief digital officer for government, told MPs that it is taking longer to achieve this objective “due to the scale and complexity of the work requiring longer to agree the most sustainable model to collect and analyse the data required to meet this ask”. As part of its efforts to fulfil PAC’s recommendation, “DSIT will also define consistent metrics and methods to measure the ongoing costs of legacy systems as well the estimated cost of failing to remediate or to replace systems”.
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Having given itself a few more months to both develop new measurements for the impact of ageing technology and take steps to ensure money is spent to address the issue, the extra time will enable government’s digital centre to better ensure legacy upgrade work supports wider digital ambitions, according to Mian.
The letter said: “The additional time for both recommendations will allow GDS to align with broader performance-tracking across government and ensure that we take the time to fully agree models that are appropriate for the level of complexity within the legacy technology landscape. Furthermore, the launch of the Roadmap for a modern digital government codifies some of the key activities government is undertaking to drive forward its adoption of AI to improve public services, and address systemic challenges such as legacy technology.”
The roadmap referred by the DSIT chief is due to be published soon, and is intended to set out a delivery plan for cross-government tech initiatives – to build and follow on from the strategic vision provided by the Blueprint for modern digital government published at the start of 2025.
The case for change
In a separate letter to the committee, related to another report on digital transformation and efficiency, Mian shone a light on several areas where government has delivered marked progress against MPs’ recommendations.
PAC had previously instructed government that, “as part of business cases, departments should explicitly set out how they will resolve issues caused by changes to old legacy systems and data and demonstrate how wider service redesign will reduce the future costs of the services they support”.
The DSIT perm sec advised the committee that “this recommendation has now been implemented”, with new measures embedded into the bidding process ahead of the long-term spending review conducted earlier this year.
“As part of the spend review process for 2025-2028 departments set out their spend plans for digital transformation and these were assured by GDS,” Mian said. “The SR process is also enabling new Treasury funding models, in line with modern digital practice, that focus on outcomes, prototyping, iteration of system design and cybersecurity. These funding models mitigate risks associated with digital spend, including the prevention of costly technology legacy and enable joined-up action across the digital government estate.”
The committee’s report had also called for “digital responsibilities, such as improving digital services and addressing the highest risk legacy systems, [to] be included in letters of appointment at the most senior levels in all departments”.
This recommendation has now been “closed”, Mian said, because “GDS has worked with Government People Group and existing digital governance structures to incorporate the acknowledgement of responsibility over digital risk into the delegation letters to accounting officers” for major departmental projects.
“Whether that be as an SRO for a large-scale transformation programme within their service or organisation, or as an overarching owner of risk(s),” he added. “Implementation has been left to the discretion of departments and GDS is not monitoring compliance with the recommended inclusion of digital responsibilities within appointment letters.”
