Met Office technology spending has passed £220m over the past three years, according to Freedom of Information data analysed by Parliament Street, with unused software licences also increasing across the same period.
The think tank said the UK’s national weather and climate service spent £222,814,500 on IT between 2023 and 2025, with 2025 marking the highest annual total at £77,662,000. That was 13% above 2023 levels. Across the three-year period, the organisation held 30,916 software licences spanning systems such as ServiceNow, Microsoft Dynamics, Atlassian, GitHub, and Microsoft 365, with Microsoft 365 accounting for the largest single group at 9,205 licences.
Alongside the headline spend, Parliament Street said the number of unused licences rose steadily, from 299 in 2023 to more than 1,100 in 2025. The proportion of unused subscriptions also climbed over the period, from 3.16% to 9.98%. The figures do not, on their own, explain how those licences were distributed across projects, users, or replacement cycles, but they do raise questions about visibility and software estate management inside a large public-sector technology environment.
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.”
The findings arrive as public bodies continue to rely more heavily on cloud software, data platforms, and digital workflows to deliver services. That makes software oversight more than a procurement issue. For public organisations managing sensitive data, forecasting systems, and operational continuity, licence discipline also connects directly to access control, governance, and spend efficiency.
