Asked by: Matt Rodda (Labour - Reading East)
Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, how much their Department spent on (a) current and (b) legacy IT infrastructure (i) in total and (ii) purchased in 2013 or earlier in each of the last three years.
Answered by Anthony Browne - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)
The cost to the public purse of external contractors used to maintain legacy IT estate cross-government is not centrally held and we are therefore unable to provide an estimate in relation to the years specified.
Asked by: Matt Rodda (Labour - Reading East)
Question to the Department for Transport:
To ask the Secretary of State for Transport, with reference to the guidance by the Central Digital and Data Office entitled Guidance on the Legacy IT Risk Assessment Framework, published on 29 September 2023, how many red-rated IT systems are used by their Department.
Answered by Anthony Browne - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Transport)
Zero.
Asked by: Matt Rodda (Labour - Reading East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how much their Department spent on (a) current and (b) legacy IT infrastructure (i) in total and (ii) purchased in 2013 or earlier in each of the last three years.
Answered by Paul Maynard - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)
DWP is unable to provide a breakdown of the figures requested as this would require a high degree of manual processing to pull the information together centrally.
Asked by: Matt Rodda (Labour - Reading East)
Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:
To ask the Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, with reference to the guidance by the Central Digital and Data Office entitled Guidance on the Legacy IT Risk Assessment Framework, published on 29 September 2023, how many red-rated IT systems are used by their Department.
Answered by David Rutley - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
As of 21 November 2023, FCDO, as a Ministerial Department, has one red-rated legacy IT system as defined in the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) Legacy IT Risk Assessment Framework. FCDO are actively managing their legacy estate via their existing change plans through system upgrades.
Asked by: Matt Rodda (Labour - Reading East)
Question to the Northern Ireland Office:
To ask the Secretary of State for Northern Ireland, with reference to the guidance by the Central Digital and Data Office entitled Guidance on the Legacy IT Risk Assessment Framework, published on 29 September 2023, how many red-rated IT systems are used by their Department.
Answered by Steve Baker - Minister of State (Northern Ireland Office)
As of 21 November 2023, the Northern Ireland Office has zero red-rated legacy IT systems as defined in the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) Legacy IT Risk Assessment Framework.
Asked by: Matt Rodda (Labour - Reading East)
Question to the Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office:
To ask the Minister of State, Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office, how much their Department spent on (a) current and (b) legacy IT infrastructure (i) in total and (ii) purchased in 2013 or earlier in each of the last three years.
Answered by David Rutley - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
It is not possible to disaggregate the requested expenditure purely against infrastructure. The majority of FCDO IT is delivered through strategic commercial partners, as a managed service. A key aspect of this service is ensuring the FCDO IT infrastructure is compliant, modern and delivers value for money for the tax payer.
Asked by: Matt Rodda (Labour - Reading East)
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, with reference to the guidance by the Central Digital and Data Office entitled Guidance on the Legacy IT Risk Assessment Framework, published on 29 September 2023, how many red-rated IT systems are used by their Department.
Answered by Paul Maynard - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Department for Work and Pensions)
As of 21 November 2023, DWP has 6 red-rated legacy IT systems as defined in the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) Legacy IT Risk Assessment Framework.
Asked by: Matt Rodda (Labour - Reading East)
Question to the Ministry of Defence:
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, how much their Department spent on (a) current and (b) legacy IT infrastructure (i) in total and (ii) purchased in 2013 or earlier in each of the last three years.
Answered by James Cartlidge - Minister of State (Ministry of Defence)
The Ministry of Defence (MOD) is committed to reducing our dependence on legacy IT systems. This is in keeping with wider efforts across Government, and in accordance with the Central Digital and Data Office’s Legacy IT Risk Assessment Framework.
As outlined in the National Audit Office report entitled The Digital Strategy for Defence: A review of early implementation in 2022, the estimated annual departmental spend on digital, which includes IT infrastructure, is approximately £4.4 billion. MOD does not routinely collect consolidated information for spending on legacy IT, and so data is not held in the format you have requested; this could only be provided at disproportionate cost.
Asked by: Matt Rodda (Labour - Reading East)
Question to the Ministry of Defence:
To ask the Secretary of State for Defence, with reference to the guidance by the Central Digital and Data Office entitled Guidance on the Legacy IT Risk Assessment Framework, published on 29 September 2023, how many red-rated IT systems are used by their Department.
Answered by James Cartlidge - Minister of State (Ministry of Defence)
As of 21 November 2023, the Ministry of Defence (MOD) has 11 red-rated legacy IT systems as defined in the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) Legacy IT Risk Assessment Framework.
The MOD takes the issue of the resilience of our IT networks extremely seriously, and we are driving forward with a number of initiatives to improve it. Work that has been undertaken in line with the CDDO framework includes conducting of obsolescence risk assessments for our critical systems, and creating remediation plans at pace for any of those requiring immediate attention.
Asked by: Matt Rodda (Labour - Reading East)
Question to the Ministry of Justice:
To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, with reference to the guidance by the Central Digital and Data Office entitled Guidance on the Legacy IT Risk Assessment Framework, published on 29 September 2023, how many red-rated IT systems are used by their Department.
Answered by Mike Freer - Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Ministry of Justice)
The spend by the Ministry of Justice on its IT infrastructure as set out in the question is provided in the table below, covering the previous three years:
| 2020/21 costs | 2021/22 costs | 2022/23 costs |
Current IT infrastructure | £191,003,356 | £186,076,175 | £190,539,822 |
It has not been possible to separate out costs in a meaningful way between current and legacy systems, or identify costs for pre-2013 systems. This is due to both the complexity of the IT estate, which includes outsourced services, and the finance systems in use across the department not being set up to operate in that way that facilitates this.
The costs in the table include the costs of networks, devices, voice and video infrastructure, print services, wifi, software licences that underpin the operation of the department (eg Oracle, Microsoft) and hosting. They do not include costs of bespoke software. The costs are the external (contract) costs to purchase infrastructure outright or as a service but do not include costs related to people or processes or documentation within MoJ.
The Ministry of Justice is actively managing its legacy estate and are either seeking to fund or are seeking to exit legacy systems via our existing change plans. The right approach varies: work under way includes upgrades, complete system replacements and migration to public cloud.
The Ministry of Justice regularly assesses the most critical services within its IT estate including those using legacy systems against its own framework. There is a significant programme of activity in place to mitigate these risks through decommissioning, migration to more modern environments and upgrades.
Earlier in 2023, an assessment was carried out on the top 10 most critical legacy IT systems. Out of these 10 systems, 5 were identified as red-rated IT systems as defined in the Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) Legacy IT Risk Assessment Framework
The Ministry of Justice is in the process of assessing all of its critical systems against the CDDO framework which will provide data on how many of these are red-rated within this framework.