UK gov’t spends £312M upgrading to Windows 10 — the OS Microsoft just buried, instead of Windows 11

Windows 10 was officially retired by Microsoft on October 14, 2025, about 10 years after its launch. Windows 11 is now the company's main focus, regularly receiving feature and security updates.

The Windows 10 End-of-Life period has caused (and will continue to cause) a lot of problems for home and business PC users, but it's one of the UK's government departments making headlines lately with its upgrade spending.

According to a report from The Register, the UK's Department for Environment, Food & Rural Affairs (Defra) has just completed the process of upgrading tens of thousands of Windows 7 PCs with Windows 10.

You're not wrong in thinking that this is a move from one obsolete operating system (OS) to another that's also been — at least partially — retired by its creator. I don't think the timing could be any worse, and I can hear a collective groan coming from the taxpayers.

The details of the governmental upgrade process came to light thanks to an official report filed by David Hill, Interim Permanent Secretary at Defra. Filed on October 10, 2025, the report lays out in detail the spending and update process.

The report is a response to a May 2023 request from the Public Accounts Committee, in which the committee requested that Defra should, in part, "strengthen its case for investment by developing its analysis of the efficiency savings that could be achieved through modernising its systems and processes."

The second part of the request says that Defra should "write to the Committee within a year with the results of this analysis and what action it plans to take as a result." That puts the Defra response at about 17 months overdue. Better late than never? Maybe not this time.

Defra's spending topped £312 million, and there's more to come

Defra Interim Permanent Secretary Hill's report lays out the details of the estate's £312 million spending to upgrade its tech. That's about $411 million USD or $576 million CAD.

The spending took place over the course of two years, with much of the money used to remove or upgrade to Windows 10, 31,500 laptops using Windows 7.

The report also details the fixing of a whopping 49,000 critical vulnerabilities in its IT network, and the migration of 137 "legacy applications" to more modern infrastructure.

Elsewhere, Defra closed a data center, upgraded the Animal and Plant Health Agency's SAM service to Defra's private cloud, and deployed security fixes to "obsolete servers" as a stopgap until they can be upgraded in the future.

Defra's report says that there remain 24,000 devices, 26,000 smartphones, and network infrastructure requiring replacement. It appears that the plan is to replace them over the course of the next three years.

Why these "devices" weren't upgraded at the same time as the raft of Windows 7 PCs is anyone's guess, but there's a good chance they weren't eligible to run Windows 10.

And, of course, all of the 31,500 laptops that were just upgraded from Windows 7 to Windows 10 are now running on borrowed time. Microsoft's Extended Security Updates (ESU) program can add another year of free updates to the retired OS, but after October 13, 2026, it's game over.

Governments move slowly, but Windows 10's shuttering doesn't help

Anyone who has worked in or alongside a government institution knows how drawn-out its actions can be, and the overdue Defra report is proof. But Microsoft should take some of the blame for the current situation.

Microsoft's decision to end official support for Windows 10 while nearly half of all Windows users around the world were still using it has been met with accusations of "planned obsolescence," and Microsoft's wishy-washy response, including the backtracking to allow for another year of security updates, has been likened to a snooze button.

Now that Defra has moved tens of thousands of PCs to Windows 10, it's essentially facing the same problem it had with Windows 7 devices. I suspect that there are likely many similar situations occurring right now within government and enterprise institutions.

It's ultimately a reminder that the fallout from Microsoft's decision to end Windows 10 will be felt for years to come.

(via TechRadar)

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