Whitehall ability implement artificial intelligence (AI) technology risks being hit by the government's reliance on an unknown amount legacy ITaccording to the findings of two separate House of Commons committees this week.
The Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, which exists to examine the findings and policies of the Department of Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), touched on the topic of outdated IT during an oral hearing held on October 14, 2025.
The session, which was part of the committee's ongoing inquiry into the work DSIT is doing to establish itself as the new “digital hub for government”, featured submissions from the Institute for Government and Crown data centres.
“Spending data is mixed at best. [including] the quality of it… but historically it has been quite difficult to link contract data to cost data,” he said.
“Market analysis firms will be able to give you a more accurate estimate, but it’s not as accurate as it could be,” he added.
The introduction of the Procurement Act in February 2025 aimed to increase transparency in public spending by introducing requirements that full details of contracts for technology deals worth more than £5 million must be published within 90 days, for example.
The idea is that it will make it easier for spending watchdogs, rival tech firms and the general public to gain unprecedented transparency into how and what the government spends its money.
However, Davis said progress toward that goal has been “a little mixed.”
“The use of all types [contract] notifications [required under the terms of the Procurement Act] growing from month to month. However, some authorities are still publishing fewer notices than before the law came into force,” he said.
“This could be a sign of non-compliance or, for example, procurement authorities choosing not to publish notices voluntarily. But in theory this law should improve [transparency]”
How much of an IT legacy does government have?
And while questions remain over how much money the government is spending on new technology, there are also difficulties in determining how large the government's legacy IT infrastructure actually is, the committee also heard.
The topic was raised during the committee hearing by Jason Liggins, CEO of Crown Hosting Data Centers, a joint venture between the Cabinet Office and colocation firm Ark Data Centres.
According to Liggins, the organization is the largest data center provider in the UK. It was created in 2015 to help public sector operators consolidate their legacy data centers and server rooms by providing access to more efficient facilities where they could host their workloads.
“Our job at Crown Hosting is to save the public sector money, reduce energy consumption, reduce carbon emissions and accelerate digital transformation,” Liggins said. “And we are already helping [the] the public sector saves £1.5 billion a year…by moving legacy IT out of public sector server rooms and closets into very large, high-efficiency facilities.”
As an example of this work, Liggins cited the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) as a key client of Crown Hosting, with whom it worked to move data and applications to a private cloud at its sites over a nine-month period.
The project was part of the DWP's wider, grassroots move to the public cloud, which has taken seven years to date, with 70% of the department's services now hosted on the public cloud.
According to Liggins, the DWP's move to Crown Hosting enabled the department to save £150 million a year in legacy IT costs and achieve its desired ROI within nine months.
In response to these figures, committee member and Labor MP Chi Onwurah asked how much IT legacy exists in government and how it is measured, given that Overview of the State of Digital Government In fact, it was discovered that departments were not keeping records of the “legacy assets” they owned.
In response, Liggins said there are mechanisms in place that provide some control over how much legacy IT is used across government, including a mechanism run by HM Treasury that requires departments to document how much electricity their IT systems use each year for carbon impact reporting purposes.
“Defra [the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs] analyzes these numbers on behalf of all departments to determine carbon savings,” Liggins said. [documented in those figures is considered] outdated IT, and this is because cloud service providers are not returning their [carbon] numbers”.
On this occasion, Onwurah asked for clarification on whether this definition meant that the government considered all non-public cloud IT assets to be legacy, and Liggins confirmed that this was the case.
“I have a special opinion about the terminology that the government uses in the sense that [in their view] all non-public cloud IT assets are legacy, whether they are old, new or modern,” he said.
In response, Onwurah said: “We can agree that this is an interesting definition… so [are you saying] committee that the government actually knows what and where its legacy is, by its own definition, looking at energy consumption?” To which Liggins confirmed that the decision was correct.
The Public Accounts Committee (PAC) also addressed the topic of legacy IT in its annual report published on 15 October 2025, which is the first report published by the organisation's last chair Geoffrey Clifton-Brown.
The PAC report noted the persistence of “outdated, legacy IT infrastructure” as a “major challenge” to the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) technologies in government, while at the same time increasing departmental vulnerability to cyber-attacks.
The report cites DSIT's definition of legacy IT systems, which describes them as “products that have reached the end of their useful life, are not supported by the vendor, are not upgradable, are no longer cost effective, or are otherwise considered to be above an acceptable risk threshold.”
By this definition, it said around 28% of central government systems met this definition in 2024, which the report described as “extremely problematic” for the government's AI plans.
“However, DSIT does not know how much legacy assets the government has in total. This is completely unacceptable in the context of an increasingly hostile digital world,” the report said.
“Although the government has announced its plans to address this issue in [DSIT’s January 2025] Modern Digital Government Project [policy document]we remain extremely concerned about the scale of the problem [so] Funding for the recovery of the highest-risk legacy technologies must be prioritized as a matter of urgency.”
The report added: “Our committee recommended that the government develop an approach to measure the costs associated with addressing legacy technology, as well as the costs of inaction, to increase transparency and improve decision-making.”
