Half of all government spending on computers is dedicated to keeping old systems going, a report has found.
The government spends £4.7bn a year on IT across all departments, and £2.3bn goes on patching up systems, some of which date back 30 years or more.
Labour said the situation showed Cabinet Office minister Michael Gove’s “incompetence and failure to deliver”.
The Cabinet Office said it was taking action to reduce the government’s reliance on outdated technology.
The Cabinet Office report, called Organising for Digital Delivery, warns that government could end up spending between £13bn and £22bn over the next five years on obsolete systems.
Cyber attack
Some government digital services “fail to meet even the minimum cyber-security standards,” it adds, and data can not be properly extracted from them, making them “one of the greatest barriers” to civil service innovation.
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The Home Office spends more than any other government department on IT but still relies on 12 so-called legacy systems, despite repeated efforts to retire them, the report found.
The government has made a big push to use data to improve public services, but despite “significant sums” being spent on data storage departments are “making little use of this data to influence action or decision-making”.
The report also says the government is not carrying out any kind of monitoring of performance of computer systems, as is common in leading private and public sector organisations.
A performance management system was put in place in 2012, but has since fallen into disuse – and even the technology that monitors its performance is now obsolete and vulnerable to a cyber attack.
The report also highlights digital success stories, such as the rapid launch of the NHS coronavirus testing service and the furlough scheme.
The Home Office’s EU Settlement Scheme is also cited as example of rapid rollout.
The report says government departments that need a new digital service should launch a “minimum loveable product”.
This means, for example, not worrying about making the website look nice and having lots of features, but to focus on the absolute bare essentials required for launching a service to the public.