Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Conclusion 26
60th Report - DWP follow-up: Autumn 2025
Published 9 Jan 2026
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee DWP follow-up: Autumn 2025 All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Conclusion (the committee's words)
We asked the Department if it had been given extra resources to deal with some of its legacy IT and what its plans were. The Department confirmed it did get specific funding in the Spending Review for both its increase in cyber security and its ‘legacy tech debt’ programme. It explained that it had aggregated the risk scores for every single system it had categorised– scoring each system against a number of dimensions. Over the next three years, it was planning to upgrade its high-risk legacy systems with the aim of reducing its overall risk score from legacy IT by 58%. The Department said that it planned to tackle the larger systems used by more staff and customers first, with the 36 highest-risk systems being addressed this year. It told us that it was not that its legacy systems could not be protected from cyber attack, but it had to put layers of protection in place so that specific threats relevant to one bit of the overall system were lessened.39
From: Public Accounts Committee, 60th Report - DWP follow-up: Autumn 2025 (HC 1447), 9 January 2026
Government response
The government responded to the whole report on 1 April 2026 (deadline 9 March 2026).
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government agrees with four of the Committee's five areas of recommendation and disagrees with the recommendation to publish regular jobcentre-level performance data.
- On integrating skills into the Jobs and Careers Service, the government agrees, naming "a key milestone" as bringing the National Careers Service together with Jobcentre Plus from 1 October 2026, with an update due in Spring 2026.
- On the shorter first work coach meeting, the government agrees and says it "will be undertaking a qualitative research project" to gather claimant insight, including feedback on the length and content of the meeting.
- The government disagrees with publishing jobcentre-level data, saying its view "remains that the right level to monitor performance is at a district and local authority level", and points to its quarterly Labour Market Insights publication.
- On PIP claim times, the government agrees and says it "will however write to the Committee to provide the information available as requested, by the end of March 2026".