The government’s announcement of a £3.25 billion Transformation Fund has been welcomed as a landmark investment in public sector modernisation. Positioned as a lever to unlock productivity and efficiency across departments, it signals a strong commitment to digital transformation. But as the dust settles, attention is now turning to how this money will be deployed - and whether it can catalyse lasting change, rather than simply plaster over cracks.
A case is emerging for dedicating a significant portion of the fund to stripping out the outdated legacy systems that continue to use up public funds and stall innovation. In doing so, departments could not only accelerate digital change, but generate meaningful savings that could be reinvested to create a self-sustaining cycle of modernisation.
Bev Wright, Head of UKI Public Sector at Adobe, believes the Transformation Fund can be a catalyst to address the foundational issues around public sector digital:
“The long-overdue modernisation and digitisation of public services will deliver significant savings to the government and vast improvements to the digital experiences citizens receive. Its success will be reliant on having a solid and secure data foundation, as well as a consistent and integrated approach that allows information to flow to the right people, with the right consent and governance in place.
“The Transformation Fund is a welcome signal of the government’s intent to unlock the enormous productivity and capability benefits of AI, but without organising government and citizen data, and replacing out-of-date legacy systems first, there is a risk it won’t actually move us forward.”
Wright’s comments reflect a concern shared by many in the sector: that without addressing the digital infrastructure gap - particularly around data architecture and interoperability - the full benefits of AI, automation and service redesign will remain out of reach.
It’s an idea that aligns with insights from last year’s State of Digital Government report, published by Government Transformation Magazine in partnership with Adobe. The report painted a clear picture of the scale of the public sector’s technology debt - and the cost of maintaining it.
More than half (50.4%) of digital leaders surveyed said their organisations devoted more than 40% of time and budget to simply maintaining legacy systems, with that figure rising to nearly 63% among arms-length bodies.
As Melville Carrie, Chief Product Officer at the Cabinet Office, noted in the report, “There’s an age-old problem where you have disparate systems, disparate data, and legacy technology that doesn’t have easy access to manifest an experience for the user.”
This fragmentation hampers both employee and citizen experience. The report identified a growing recognition among public sector leaders of the connection between internal employee experience (EX) and external citizen experience (CX) - two sides of the same coin in effective service delivery. Yet the enduring presence of legacy tech continues to limit progress on both fronts.