Recommendation 16

The Environment Agency told us it had a large legacy IT problem in 2020, with 700 IT systems in total. It told us it had modernised its systems and closed down 350 applications. It had also improved the transparency of its information by publishing all its reports on water quality. However, it acknowledged it has issues still to address, for example replicating this transparency in other sectors such as waste.39 Natural England has received limited funding for digital transformation of its core regulatory services in recent years.40 It told us it hopes future investment will allow it to mirror the digital improvements at the Environment Agency. It plans to invest in customer-facing regulatory systems which are more user-friendly and should speed up processing times, and to make use of AI when handling data.41