The UK's State of Digital Government review has found that, on average, 28 percent of the central government's technology is still considered "legacy."

The review notes that, while the government spends more than £26 billion ($32.33bn) annually on digital technology, a notable proportion of its technology remains outdated, and service reliability is too low.

Additionally, the £26bn ($32.33bn) investment is significantly less than peers, with the review suggesting it sits around 30 percent below benchmark comparisons.

Across the central government, the average amount of legacy technology comprised 28 percent of systems, up from 26 percent in 2023. According to the research, this was more variable when looking at the NHS trusts and police forces - sitting between 10-50 percent and 10-70 percent, respectively.

The review defines "legacy tech" as "an end-of-life product, out of support from the supplier, impossible to update, no longer cost-effective, or considered to be otherwise above the acceptable risk threshold." The review notes that this is a narrower definition than in private sector organizations who would consider the government's use of legacy technology to be even higher.

Many departments, additionally, do not accurately classify their legacy assets - with the exception of the Ministry of Defence, Home Office, and Ministry of Justice. Others are still in the process of developing registers. The review notes that, therefore, much of these statistics are based on "estimates," and around 15 percent of survey respondents "could not even estimate the size of their legacy estate."

Additionally, organizations including the Department for Work and Pensions and NHS England spend as much as 75-80 percent of their technology budgets on upkeep of systems instead of modernization.

“Fundamentally the biggest hindrance I’m experiencing from legacy is stability. Resiliency of the system. This is why we’re reaching the press so often,” said one CDIO of a central government department.

The review notes that there is "no consistent measure of service reliability" but that 2024 had several critical outages that impacted everyday processes, causing reduced quality of care in hospitals, delays at border control e-gates, and disruption to emergency calls. Among those were 123 outages impacting NHS England.

Key examples include a May 2024 incident at HMRC where half a million people were left without their child benefit payments and an NHS outage that was "linked to patient harm."

Around 46 percent of respondents said that more than 60 percent of their estate had been moved to the cloud but most of these migrations had not included "full refactoring." This is also inconsistent across departments, with the review offering the example that 63 percent of the Home Office estate is on the cloud while "a large proportion of local government workloads and data remains on premise."

Overall, the review notes that "underinvestment in technology increases long-term costs and total costs of ownership, with [the] maintenance of legacy systems often costing three to four times that of modern alternatives," concluding that "it is time to transform and reform the way we do digital."

Earlier this month, the UK's National Audit Office released a report that identified issues with the government's technology procurement process. That report found: "[the] government’s attempts at digital transformation have had mixed success. Former flagship major transformation programs have failed to deliver results as expected.

"The center of government sets the overall direction, culture, and conditions, but individual departments award contracts to suppliers and subsequently manage them. It is at this departmental level where problems, arising from the overall commercial and contracting environment and processes, are most likely to manifest themselves."

January also saw reports stating that HM Revenues & Customs, the UK's tax collector, had spent £3.8 billion ($4.67bn) on contracts with tech suppliers over the last five years, of which £591 million ($726.85m) excluded competition. The department is still seeking to modernize its IT estate for a digital tax system while using IT service providers it secured deals with now more than 20 years ago.

In June 2023, a former civil servant turned whistleblower told the TaxPayers' Alliance: "The ongoing use of legacy systems in government is a disgrace and completely inexcusable. We move at such a slow pace that it seems only to get worse... The problem is so bad that some of these systems could be taken down by an enthusiastic child."