The UK’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) has spent £312 million (c $407 million) modernizing its IT estate, including replacing tens of thousands of Windows 7 laptops with Windows 10 – which officially reached end of support last month.

The details were set out in a letter from Defra’s interim permanent secretary, David Hill, to Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, chair of the Public Accounts Committee.

The letter was sent in response to a May 2023 report from the committee that recommended that Defra strengthen its business case for IT investment by analyzing the efficiency savings achievable through modernization and report back within a year with the results and planned actions.

In its response, submitted more than a year after the Committee’s May 2024 deadline, Defra said that during the current spending review period (2022-23 to 2024-25) it invested heavily in “upgrading obsolete devices and software, including removing 31,500 Windows 7 laptops from the estate and upgrading to Windows 10.” The investment also tackled more than 49,000 “critical vulnerabilities,” migrated 137 legacy applications, and shut down one of its ageing datacenters, with three more closures planned.

It is also deploying an extensive security “hyper care” solution to keep obsolete servers protected until full upgrades can be completed in the next cycle.

The department insists the refresh will make Defra more efficient, improve the reliability of critical systems such as flood prevention and border controls, and reduce exposure to cyber risk. But the decision to deploy an operating system that Microsoft stopped supporting on October 14 – unless customers pay for extended updates – suggests some of that £312 million may already be buying obsolescence.

The Register asked Defra whether it is paying Microsoft for extended support but did not receive a response by publication time. 

Defra’s submission also outlines the next stage of its modernization program, which will focus on remediating and migrating its most business-critical legacy applications to the cloud, prioritizing cyber and personnel risks, and replacing “end-of-life hardware including 24,000 devices, 26,000 smartphones and network infrastructure” to keep services secure and supported.

That detail hints at just how deep the backlog runs. The 24,000 end-of-life devices likely include older hardware that can’t support Windows 10’s requirements, let alone Windows 11, suggesting Defra’s digital estate has been running on borrowed time. It also raises the question of whether the Windows 10 rollout was a stopgap measure to buy time before a broader move to cloud-based systems.

The department said the program also aims to improve productivity and efficiency by transforming services, phasing out paper forms, and investing in automation and artificial intelligence to cut costs and improve customer experience.

While the department argues the investment will release “significant efficiency savings” in the next spending review period, large-scale hardware refreshes and migrations often prove more expensive and complex than planned. 

Still, the intent marks progress. Defra’s letter describes the next phase as an effort to build a reliable, secure, and supported technology base after years of deferred upgrades. If the department follows through with its cloud migration and decommissioning plans, it could finally close the chapter on a decade of technical debt. 

But if it stops at Windows 10, it may find itself right back where it started – maintaining another generation of unsupported systems, just under a new name. ®