Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, what is the annual cost to the public purse of his Department's expenditure on (a) IT infrastructure, (b) IT infrastructure purchased prior to 2013 and (c) legacy IT infrastructure for each year since 2010.

The total main technology services costs are below for each year from 2018/2019 for Defra, the Environment Agency, Natural England, the Rural Payments Agency, the Animal and Plant Health Agency and the Marine Management Organisation. We cannot provide this information pre 2018/2019 as IT services, and therefore costs, were disaggregated across all parts of Defra group before 2018.

Departments are actively managing their legacy estates and are either seeking to fund or are seeking to exit legacy systems via their existing change plans. The right approach varies: work under way includes upgrades, complete system replacements and migration to public cloud.