Recommendation 26

We observed that our predecessor Committee saw examples where departments made mistakes in designing and procuring digital programmes, particularly where legacy technology was involved. We were concerned that some larger departments are better served with digital skills than some of the smaller ones, but that even in large departments this expertise is not always utilised. We asked whether there would be a set of commercial people with digital skills in every department. The Cabinet Office told us that it did not know. We therefore asked what government was doing to make sure every single department was up to speed. GDS told us that often, the challenges and the ability to meet them were not evenly distributed across departments, and that the departments with the biggest challenge were often the teams who did not have sufficient scale. It said that this was dependent on the size of a department’s digital estate, rather than the department’s size alone.44 41 Qq 32, 39 42 Q 51 43 Qq 38, 41, 56 44 Qq 55–58 17