Question to the Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government:

To ask the Secretary of State for Housing, Communities and Local Government, how many IT systems which his Department uses are more than (a) three, (b) five and (c) eight years old; and what steps he is taking to ensure that all his Department's IT systems are updated promptly.

The IT systems which my Department uses are (a) 2 more than three (b) 1 more than five and (c) 2 more than eight years old respectively.

All the departmental IT systems are maintained regularly, with product updates and patches being applied as part of regular patching cycles. Of the two older systems, one is due to be decommissioned and replaced by a new system later this year and the other was successfully migrated to a new cloud based platform with the software being suitably updated to new supported technologies in 2016.