Recommendation 27

The Department told us that, if implemented successfully, its plans to upgrade its legacy IT could transform its customer service and productivity, enabling it to provide services where customers could do more for themselves where they are able to, and to take away some of the more administrative tasks that staff spent too much time doing to free up their capacity to spend more time serving customers. It said that it had just launched a customer account which would enable citizens to do things across multiple benefits, rather than just one by one.40 However, we have previously noted that major digital transformation programmes have often failed to deliver as intended, with government struggling to modernise a legacy environment at the same time as harbouring a major ambition to exploit opportunities from new technologies.41 38 Qq 62-63 39 Qq 58-59, 68-69 40 Qq 53, 64 41 Committee of Public Accounts, Government’s relationship with digital technology suppliers, Twenty-Seventh Report of Session 2024–25, HC 640, 6 June 2025, p 1 15