The UK government does not have a clear picture of what it is spending on digital technology, and its approach to buying associated services and products drives up the cost of investment, MPs have heard.
Joe Hill, policy director of the Reform think tank and former Treasury and Home Office official, told a select committee that digital technology covers “very large swathes of public spending,” but was not well understood.
He said digital spending might include core technology infrastructure to deliver its day-to-day business, such as cloud compute, on-premises compute, application subscriptions, and common components like database infrastructure. Staff costs in building, maintaining, and running those services could also be included, he told the House of Commons Science, Innovation, and Technology Committee last week.
“It is a big category, but it’s not particularly comprehensively mapped and exercises to do that to the nth degree have been done over the years, they’re always very stochastic. Every few years someone says, ‘oh, we don’t really know [how much we spend on digital], let’s do that again’,” he said.
Last month, HM Treasury published its policy paper reviewing digital spending in the UK government. It found that between spending reviews, departments prioritize short-term savings over long-term digital investments while maintenance is a low priority.
“This results in mounting technical debt with outdated legacy systems and hampers progress,” it said. “The absence of agreed upon metrics to measure outcomes also limits the ability to demonstrate value for money in digital spending.”
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Speaking to MPs, Hill said the HM Treasury review was “really promising, but we’d like to see them go further.”
In January, the government published its “blueprint for a modern digital government,” promising to overhaul how it delivers digital services and the way in which it spends £23 billion ($28 billion) a year on technology.
Hill said the government needed to change its investment approach, which tended to make adopting digital technologies more expensive than it should be.
“There are very large amounts of government technology spending which are locked into these very long-term change programs. It takes a year to write the business case, another year to get through all of the technology approvals, and a year to procure from the [vendor].”
He said vendors would then “come in and find that there are no in-house staff to help them do the work and suddenly you’re three and a bit years in and the technology has moved on.”
“How expensive the government thinks technology is, is much higher than it actually should be,” he said.
Hill argued that overbearing checks and balances made technology procurement “very expensive, very time consuming, and then [it] inevitably goes wrong.” ®
