Our guide to modernising effectively for central government  

Why legacy is the real ceiling on AI

It is hard to bolt modern AI onto systems built before the smartphone. The Public Accounts Committee and the Commons Science, Innovation and Technology Committee have both pointed to how far ageing systems hold back AI ambitions across government. The limiting factor is rarely the model. It is the data trapped inside disconnected systems, and the cost of keeping those systems alive, which the State of Digital Government review estimated at three to four times the cost of modern alternatives. 

The funding model does not help. Capital is often easier to secure than ongoing running costs, yet cloud shifts spend in exactly that direction. Trimming maintenance budgets to save money in-year tends to cost more later. 

A sensible order of work

Not everything needs a full rebuild, and treating it that way is how programmes overrun. A structured assessment sorts what to rehost, what to replatform, and what genuinely needs rewriting. Cloud landing zones give departments a governed place to move into, and getting the sequence right lowers both cost and risk while creating the clean data foundation any credible AI plan needs. 

Identity deserves its own attention. Departments are moving away from bespoke sign-in towards shared services, and flagship programmes such as GOV.UK One Login depend on getting this right. It reduces sprawl, tightens the audit trail, and gives a cleaner base for zero-trust security. 

Then comes what everyone wants: productivity. Government runs a vast digital estate, but the depth of modern tool adoption is uneven across departments. Governed AI, with proper guardrails, can give officials hours back. s also what frees the money to change anything at all. 

Two constraints sit behind the rest. Resilience runs underneath everything: the State of Digital Government review noted the NCSC dealt with a sharp rise in nationally significant incidents, so recovery planning is now a board-level concern rather than a technical footnote. And skills are tight. The civil service still describes itself as generalist and policy-led, and it competes with the private sector for the same cyber, data, and AI specialists; co-delivery can fill the gap without permanent headcount, and build capability inside the team over time. 

Procurement clarity helps too. The Procurement Act 2023 has changed the rules, and compliant routes such as the Government Commercial Agency frameworks keep buying clean and quick. The outcome a department needs should lead, and the technology should follow. 

It is easy to frame all of this as an internal IT story. For the public, it shows up differently: a form that remembers who they are, a service that works on a phone, a letter that arrives when it should. Modernisation that loses sight of that tends to lose support quickly, which is why measurement matters. A baseline, and a way to show movement against it, turns a productivity claim into something a permanent secretary can trust.