According to TheRegister.com, the UK’s Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) spent £312 million (about $407 million) modernizing its IT systems, including replacing 31,500 Windows 7 laptops with Windows 10. The massive upgrade came as Windows 10 officially reached end of support on October 14, 2024, meaning Microsoft no longer provides security updates unless customers pay extra. Defra’s interim permanent secretary David Hill detailed the spending in a letter to MP Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown, who chairs the Public Accounts Committee. Despite the huge investment, the department still needs to replace 24,000 end-of-life devices, 26,000 smartphones, and network infrastructure. The modernization program also addressed over 49,000 critical vulnerabilities and migrated 137 legacy applications while closing one aging datacenter.
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<h2 id="windows-10-dilemma”>The Windows 10 dilemma
Here’s the thing that makes this whole situation pretty wild. Defra basically spent over £300 million to migrate from one unsupported operating system to… another unsupported operating system. Windows 10 reached its end-of-life last month, which means no more security patches unless Defra is paying Microsoft for extended support. The Register asked if they’re doing exactly that, but got no response before publishing.
So what’s the play here? It looks like the Windows 10 rollout might have been a stopgap measure to buy time before a broader cloud migration. The department is using what they call a security “hyper care” solution to protect obsolete servers until full upgrades can happen in the next cycle. But let’s be real – that sounds expensive and temporary at best.
The technical debt mountain
Those 24,000 devices still needing replacement tell the real story. They’re likely older hardware that can’t even run Windows 10 properly, let alone Windows 11. This suggests Defra’s digital estate has been running on borrowed time for years. The department admitted in its response to the Public Accounts Committee that they’re now prioritizing cyber risks and migrating business-critical applications to the cloud.
And get this – they submitted their response more than a year late. That pretty much sums up the challenge of government IT modernization. The intentions are good, but the execution timeline? Not so much.
What comes next?
The department insists this investment will make critical systems like flood prevention and border controls more reliable while reducing cyber risk. They’re talking about phasing out paper forms and investing in automation and AI to cut costs. But large-scale hardware refreshes almost always end up being more complex and expensive than planned.
Still, there’s some progress here. If Defra actually follows through with its cloud migration and decommissioning plans, they might finally dig themselves out of a decade of technical debt. But if they stop at Windows 10? They’ll be right back where they started, just with a different unsupported operating system.
Basically, this feels like one of those government IT stories we’ve seen before. Huge spending to catch up, only to end up behind again because technology moves faster than bureaucracy. The real test will be whether they can actually complete the cloud migration before Windows 10 becomes the next Windows 7.
