UK agri dept spent hundreds of millions upgrading to Windows 10 – just in time for end of support

The UK's Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) has spent £312 million (c $407 million) modernizing its IT estate, including replacing tens of thousands of Windows 7 laptops with Windows 10 – which officially reached end of support last month.

The details were set out in a letter from Defra's interim permanent secretary, David Hill, to Sir Geoffrey Clifton-Brown MP, chair of the Public Accounts Committee.

The letter was sent in response to a May 2023 report from the committee that recommended that Defra strengthen its business case for IT investment by analyzing the efficiency savings achievable through modernization and report back within a year with the results and planned actions.

In its response, submitted more than a year after the Committee's May 2024 deadline, Defra said that during the current spending review period (2022-23 to 2024-25) it invested heavily in "upgrading obsolete devices and software ...