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“This results in mounting technical debt with outdated legacy systems and hampers progress,” it said.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 Janua