Departmental records show the following expenditure by financial year on software licenses specifically for E-Claims:

The E-Claims service is a management and control system for the delivery of programmes to meet European Commission guidelines. The public facing component of the service allows users to apply for European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) or European Social Fund (ESF) money.

Departmental records show the following expenditure by financial years on software licenses:

There has been significant investment in software licenses associated with the development of major business applications, in particular:

• E-Claims, which supports the administration of the European Regional Development fund and European Social Fund

• DELTA, which rationalises the Department’s key data collection and grant administration systems

• CORE, which collects social housing sales and lettings data

• Troubled Families (TFAM), which supports a key DCLG policy helping over 400,000 families

• Fair Chance Fund (FCF), which supports a £15 million programme to move the hardest to help homeless people off the streets and into employment where possible.

[holding answer 17 January 2014]: In my answer of 16 January 2014, Official Report, column 609W, I noted how the Department is in the process of upgrading its desktop IT systems for productivity and security reasons, including the fact that the systems are seven years old, and that Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2003 will shortly no longer be supported.

My Department has placed purchase orders relating to software licences costing £211,549 in 2012-13 and for £89,454 in the period April 2013 to December 2013. This excludes software purchased by our outsourced IT service provider.

Doing nothing is not an option, given the lack of security patches would expose Government systems to potential cyber-attacks, and due to issues with old legacy software not working on new systems.

However, the new arrangements are also an opportunity to deliver savings. The new Desktop IT Services contract will cut yearly costs by 40% compared to current contracts, delivering a significant saving for taxpayers. My previous answer also outlined the steps we are taking to use open source software.

To place such figures in context, the right hon. Member may wish to peruse the answer of 6 February 2007, Official Report, column 780W, which outlines spending under the last Administration. The Department/its predecessor spent £3.2 million on non-corporate software licences in 2003-04, £2.6 million in 2004-05 and £1.8 million in 2005-06, plus an additional £2.1 million on corporate software licences and maintenance over that period.

The last Administration failed to get value for taxpayers' money due to poor management of IT contracts. Indeed, the Department published a contract tender in December 2009 for a desktop IT programme costing up to £160 million. This was subsequently cancelled under this Government as part of our wider reduction in departmental spending and reconfiguration of IT procurement policy.

[holding answer 5 November 2013]: In August 2013, the Department's outsourced IT service provider (Steria as part of its hand-over to our new provider Fujitsu) recorded that the Department had 57,739 software licences in use across 2,500 desktops. These licences included core desktops which had 27 different elements to the system including, for example, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Office, virus protection, SAP Enterprise Resource Planning software application, Personal Information Management System and remote access licences.

Our procurement records show that DCLG has purchased a total of 9,498 software licences for the period May 2010 to October 2013. This does not include software purchased by the Department's outsourced IT services providers.

The overwhelming bulk of these purchases have been made in the last year, as part of the Department's upgrading of its desktop IT systems; these systems were initially purchased in 2007 and are now are in need of upgrading, for productivity and security reasons. This includes migrating from Windows XP and Microsoft Office 2013, which Microsoft are shortly ceasing to support (ie no longer publishing security patches). We are also seeking to rationalise the number of products in use, from the legacy systems inherited from the Department's predecessors, including the Department for Environment, Transport and the Regions.

As my Department recommended in our document, “50 ways to save”, we are reducing our software costs through the use of Open Source software. There are a

number of excellent examples in DCLG of this approach including our new intranet and the public facing 'opendatacommunities' web solution that relies on a very wide range of .open source software. The end point operating system on 50% of our new estate is now Linux based.

The new Desktop IT Services contract will cut yearly costs by 40%, compared to current contracts, delivering a significant saving for taxpayers.

My Department is committed to supporting the Government's ICT plans and is adopting the relevant key components of the common ICT infrastructure that includes the greater use of open source, as laid out in the April 2012 Cabinet Office policy document.

www.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/sites/default/files/resources/All_About_Open_Source_v2_0.pdf

In line with this, we are taking forward our applications roadmap and where appropriate we will recommend the use of open source products to replace our existing applications.

The new gov.uk website which DCLG uses is built on open source software. The single domain is built using ruby on rails

www.rubyonrails.org/

and the micro sites that sit beneath the main platform are based on Wordpress content management.

www.wordpress.org

Further information can be found at the following link:

http://digital.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/2012/10/12/coding-in-the-open/

In my Department, we also utilise several free system administrator tools, including spice works and wall watcher.

In my department's publication “50 Ways to Save”, we have encouraged the use of open source software as a cost effective option for local authorities.