Question to the Ministry of Justice:

To ask the Secretary of State for Justice, how much his Department has (a) budgeted for and (b) spent on software updates to legacy computer systems in each of the last three financial years.

Please see the figures for budget and spending by the Ministry of Justice and HMCTS.

The Ministry of Justice does not record its budgets and expenditure to a level of granularity that permits it to identify spend that is specifically for software updates to legacy computer systems.

The Ministry of Justice maintains a fund specifically for the reduction and eradication of technical debt – this fund focusses on improving and replacing legacy infrastructure and software applications; migrating business-critical applications from legacy hosting arrangements to the cloud, which is much more modern and secure; and bringing its digital and technology estate up to required standards.

The table below sets out the Ministry of Justice budget and expenditure of the Technical Debt fund for the past three full financial years – 2020/21, 2021/22 and 2022/23.