Parliament’s spending watchdog has accused the UK government of chasing AI while neglecting the systems underneath it. In his second annual report, Public Accounts Committee chair Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown said Whitehall is showing a worrying lack of urgency about legacy IT, which raises cyber security risk and blocks the benefits of new technology, even as AI hands criminals and hostile states better tools of attack.
The staffing numbers anchor the criticism. Only 6 percent of civil servants work in digital and data roles, against the government’s own 10 percent target, and senior specialists are especially scarce. The report also cites fraud and error costing taxpayers an estimated 55 billion to 81 billion pounds a year, with the Department for Work and Pensions overpaying 9.9 billion pounds in 2025-26, 3.2 percent of its spending, and planning only to reach 2.8 percent by 2028-29.
The committee pointed to National Savings and Investments as the cautionary modernization tale: an IT overhaul begun in 2020 had cost 3 billion pounds by December 2024, 1.3 billion pounds over its first estimate, is rated red for delivery risk, and has no firm completion date. The Bank of England’s 431 million pound core payments upgrade, finished in April 2025, was held up as the counterexample. A planned departmental reshuffle creating a new business, science and trade department adds further disruption risk, the report said.
For vendors and for other governments, the report is a useful corrective to AI-first announcements: the binding constraints are legacy replacement and specialist hiring, and neither is solved by a model procurement.