Image source: UK Parliament CC BY 3.0
Replacing legacy digital systems has been labelled as one of the ‘big nasties’ of essential government spending that cannot be put off by the chair of Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee (PAC).
Dame Meg Hillier has published her annual report, indicating that there should be a sense of urgency for spending in several key areas of public services.
These include broad areas such as hospitals, the healthcare workforce, schools, local authorities and supported housing, and more specifics including legacy government IT and technology in the courts system.
The report says there are significant issues with ageing IT systems, such as 30% of applications used by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs being so outdated they are not supported by their supplier, and old systems in the Ministry of Defence complicating routine tasks such as ordering boots.
Another example is the Department for Work and Pensions having underpaid pensioners by £2.5 billion because of errors due to outdated systems, and a lack of functionality that has caused continued reliance on manual processing and the use of multiple systems to complete tasks.
Expensive and risky
Legacy systems are also expensive to maintain and modernise and are at risk of failure and cyber attacks, and contribute to wider inefficiencies in public services.
“Government must find cost-effective ways to upgrade its IT systems, especially considering the high human and monetary cost of errors,” the report says.
This is accompanied a severe shortage of many skills, including in digital and cyber security, that is affecting the efficiency and effectiveness of projects. This has to be addressed or there will be huge risks to the delivery of major initiatives.
The report also highlights the backlog of cases in the courts system, saying the right technology and working practices are vital to its reduction, and that without these there will consequences for staff and taxpayers.
Hillier says in the report that these are parts of a broad pattern in which the Government has not been spending sufficiently on major requirements of long term importance to the country.
Look to long term
“Government does not do enough to plan for the long term, or to provide long term investment for its policies,” she says. “This not only causes problems now, but leaves problems that will be critical in the future.
“Lack of forward thinking means leaving problems that are more costly and more urgent, until they get to the point where they can no longer be ignored. Government must become better at ‘slow politics’. Politicians, commentators and the public need to acknowledge that planning ahead—for resilience and to tackle future risks—is good government.”
