Over 1,000 software licences went unused last year
The Met Office, the UK’s national weather and climate service, has showered over £220 million on IT spending over the past three years, amid the launch of its two-week forecast.
The data, retrieved via the Freedom of Information Act (FOI) and analysed by the Parliament Street think tank, observed the number of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) subscriptions within the agency, the percentage of unused licences, and the total IT budget each calendar year for the past three years.
In total, the Met Office poured £222,814,500 into IT spending in three years. 2025 saw the highest expenditure with £77,662,000, up 13 per cent from 2023 levels.
As part of the expenditure, the agency spent on a total of 30,916 software licences, ranging from offerings from ServiceNow to Microsoft Dynamics to Atlassian to GitHub, with Microsoft 365 packages accounting for the most at 9,205 licences.
However, the Met Office has seen a steady rise in unused licences for the past three years, jumping from 299 in 2023 to 1,1121 in 2025.
Unused licences jumped from 3.16 per cent to 9.98 per cent of the total subscriptions each year.
Commenting on the findings, Stuart Harvey, CEO of Datactics, said: “SaaS licences, whether it’s Microsoft 365 or a Netflix subscription, are cheap to buy, but it’s easy to forget they’re there, and all of a sudden you end up paying for something you’re not using. If you don’t have control, you spend more money and introduce risk as there may be people who have left the organisation or moved to new departments that have unauthorised access to systems. Up-to-date, validated data that outlines what outstanding licences are being paid for and who has access is vital to managing costs and data risks.”
Elizabeth Anderson, CEO of the Digital Poverty Alliance, commented: “Businesses and society alike are guilty of overspending on unused tech, so these findings serve as a reminder to check unused subscriptions and cut wasted spending. Especially as government are increasingly moving services online, from exam results to tax returns, departments should shift that money towards digital inclusion to support the up to 19 million people who struggle to access those very services that are going digital only.”
