COBOL and Coffins: The UK Still Runs on Dead Tech and Dead Men’s Code

Welcome to the United Kingdom: land of historic traditions, collapsing infrastructure, and government systems running on programming languages that predate moon landings and colour television. The Queen is dead, the trains are delayed, and half the welfare system still relies on Colin, a 68-year-old COBOL wizard whose last holiday was Y2K.

Yes, we’re talking about legacy systems. Ancient tech. Code so old it farts dust. And yet, somehow, this digital necromancy still underpins some of the most mission-critical infrastructure in Britain today—from DWP benefits to NHS records to the Post Office’s accounting system, but better known now as Exhibit A in a nationwide miscarriage of justice.

So let’s dig into the rotting mainframes of Whitehall, the creaking COBOL in your bank account, and the generation of unsung techno-druids keeping the lights on. Just mind the asbestos, and whatever you do, don’t reboot anything.

The DWP: Delivering With Punchcards

Over at the Department for Work and Pensions, the IT stack is a digital Jenga tower built on COBOL. The average age of a COBOL developer working there is around 62. The oldest? Reportedly 76. These aren’t dinosaurs, they’re living encyclopaedias of business logic and patch history, the only ones who know why that obscure piece of 1980s code still decides how your Universal Credit is calculated.

The DWP has admitted its infrastructure is “built on unsustainable technology”, which is a bit like calling the Titanic a boutique floating hotel. Systems are held together with duct tape, Java wrappers, and the slowly dwindling population of mainframe wizards who haven’t yet said, “I’m out.”

Modernisation is, of course, on the roadmap. Right after they finish updating the fax machines. To be fair, this is a UK-wide sport. The entire digital transformation effort is proceeding at such a pace, it could only be matched by Japan’s approach to government tech, where they famously said “sod it” and committed to faxes and paper forms well into the 21st century. True security by obscurity. Respect.

And yet, the DWP has spent hundreds of millions on IT over the years. Cloud initiatives, contractor armies, pilot projects, and digital strategies that sound lovely in a PowerPoint, but quietly dissolve into a puff of consultancy smoke. The Parliamentary Public Accounts Committee has raised eyebrows more than once over ballooning costs with little visible progress. It's less "value for money" and more "value for someone's yacht." So yes, your tax pounds are hard at work, somewhere between an IBM license fee and a Deloitte lunch meeting.

The DWP is caught in a long-term licensing waltz with IBM, spending tens of millions to keep its legacy COBOL-based systems wheezing along. These aren't just any licences, they’re enterprise-wide agreements covering around 85 IBM products that prop up over 20 mission-critical applications, from benefits payments to fraud detection. In 2024, DWP quietly renewed another two-year deal worth around £10 million, and that’s on top of earlier £25 million extensions just to keep the lights on. The model is pure IBM brilliance: capacity-based billing, where more usage means more cash, regardless of whether it’s for testing, updates, or just poking the damn thing to make sure it is still alive. The profit margins? A staggering 80–90% for IBM. And the exit plan? Well, there was a heroic effort to migrate the Job Seeker’s Allowance Payment System (JSAPS) off mainframes and onto Linux, a feat involving billions of records and a COBOL exorcism, but several core systems remain stubbornly lodged in IBM’s embrace. As long as those stay live, the DWP stays locked in, wallet open.

Of course, no modern government tech fiasco would be complete without the true apex predators of the public sector: the consultants. Enter Deloitte, management consultancy’s answer to quantum entanglement, in that they seem to be simultaneously everywhere and doing absolutely nothing useful. Over the years, DWP and other UK departments have shovelled millions into consultancy contracts with Deloitte, Accenture, Capgemini and their ilk, paying eye-watering day rates for strategy decks that could be generated faster (and with more honesty) by asking a Magic 8 Ball. Deloitte’s fingerprints are all over failed transformation schemes: pilot projects that never flew, discovery phases that discovered nothing, and change frameworks that cost more than the actual changes. It’s government IT as performance art, massive whiteboards, buzzwords like “agile at scale” and “cloud-native” hurled about with the reckless abandon of a junior associate on Red Bull, and at the end of it, the COBOL is still there, blinking in confusion and running the country.

Post Office Horizon: The Ghost in the Machine

Horizon is what you get when you cross bad code with worse management and then marinate it in institutional arrogance for two decades. Designed in the 1990s by Fujitsu, it was supposed to modernise Post Office accounting. Instead, it became a Kafkaesque nightmare that falsely accused hundreds of subpostmasters, ordinary, law-abiding citizens, of theft, fraud, and false accounting. Some were imprisoned. Some lost their homes, their livelihoods, their families. A few took their own lives. And for years, they were told the fault lay with them, not the glitch-ridden system humming quietly in the background, making spreadsheet errors look like criminal conspiracies.

This wasn’t just a bug. This was a systemic, preventable, government-endorsed obliteration of innocent people’s lives, carried out with all the care and compassion of a spreadsheet macro. And somehow, no one from Fujitsu or the Post Office leadership has gone to jail. Not a single executive. Not a single IT supplier. Only the victims were punished. Compensation has been slow, redress half-hearted, and accountability non-existent.

And what happened when the truth came out? The government quietly extended the contract. Horizon will now run until at least 2030, for a casual £600 million, because apparently no one at Whitehall wants to admit they can’t turn it off without summoning the wrath of some ancient daemon trapped inside a Fujitsu mainframe.

The scandal might’ve remained brushed under the bureaucratic carpet if it weren’t for the ITV drama Mr Bates vs. The Post Office. It wasn’t parliamentary oversight or journalistic crusading that finally cracked open the silence, it was primetime telly. Only when the British public saw Toby Jones on screen playing an actual victim did ministers start scrambling, suddenly realising that “Oh dear, it looks bad.” Not just morally bad. Optics bad.

In the end, it took a fictionalised retelling of real human tragedy to make the political class take notice. And even now, the victims are still waiting; for justice, for compensation, for someone in a suit to admit that the machine was broken, and so was the system around it.

Banks: Digital Front, COBOL Back

Your slick mobile banking app? That’s just a shiny ReactJS turd-polisher for something running on a mainframe older than your mum’s perm. Many UK banks still process core transactions on COBOL systems built during the Cold War. You’d think the backbone of the UK’s financial system would be bleeding edge, right? Nope. It’s bleeding alright, just not in the good way.

UK banks were pioneers in mainframe computing. Starting in the 1960s, institutions like Barclays and NatWest saw the shiny IBM boxes and said, “Yes please, we’ll run the future of finance on that.” COBOL, born in 1959, was embraced as the ideal language to describe financial logic in something almost resembling English. That choice made sense at the time, what didn't make sense was never letting go.

By the 1980s, almost every UK high street bank had a mainframe purring away in a backroom like a chain-smoking tabby cat that processed cheque clearances, calculated interest, and kept track of little old ladies' pensions.

Today, when you tap your card at Greggs, a neat-looking app on a card reader probably fires a request to a middleware layer, which hits another layer, which pokes an enterprise service bus, which whispers to an emulated terminal pretending it's 1975. Somewhere, buried under twenty layers of digital tinsel, a COBOL program blinks awake and does the maths.

Most customer-facing services have been re-skinned with React or Angular and wrapped in enough microservices to make Kafka scream. But deep in the data centre (or some rented IBM z/OS cloud), the real accounting still happens the old-school way.

These systems are so mission-critical they dare not be touched. Engineers whisper about them like cursed relics: “It works. Don’t ask how. Don’t look at it. Just feed it some more power and back away slowly.”

Meanwhile, the twenty-something fintech whizzkid with a sleeve tattoo and 15 colour-coded terminal themes is crying into his YAML file because the mainframe doesn’t support emojis.

Modern Devs vs Legacy Tech: A Love Story (Not)

Ask a modern developer to touch COBOL and you’ll watch their soul leave their body like a Victorian child catching consumption. These are engineers who think “production” means deploying a React app that displays a weather widget, hosted on six different microservices and costing £1,200 a month in AWS bills. They’ve never seen a terminal that didn’t look like a synthwave music video. If their command line interface doesn’t come with a full RGB colour palette and six custom fonts, it’s a war crime.

They run Chrome, Docker, Discord, Spotify, and seventeen VS Code extensions simultaneously on a MacBook with 32GB of RAM, and still complain that it's “laggy.” Their Windows laptops sound like they’re preparing for takeoff at Heathrow. And they need three productivity apps just to open a Markdown file and cry about it on Reddit.

If the documentation isn’t a Notion doc with pastel highlights and toggle buttons, they’ll curl into the foetal position. They genuinely believe JSON is a human-readable format. And God forbid you mention Vim, half of them think it’s a crypto token, and the other half tried to exit it once in 2021 and are still trapped there.

Meanwhile, Colin, the last of the COBOL elders, is sat in his shed, logged in via telnet, navigating hex dumps like a wartime codebreaker. No colours. No plugins. No mouse. Just raw, arcane power and decades of acquired trauma. He manually resets memory pointers with the sheer force of will (and arthritis), all while listening to BBC Radio 4 on an actual radio.

He doesn’t need a dark mode. His entire worldview is dark mode at this point.

And here’s the kicker: Colin’s code? It works. It’s ugly, undocumented, and smells faintly of cigarettes and regret, but it processes millions of transactions flawlessly while your Kubernetes cluster has an existential meltdown because someone forgot to indent a YAML file.

So yes, the kids are smart. They know their NPM from their NLP, and they can spin up a Docker container in less time than it takes to make a cup of oat milk flat white. But when the mainframe howls at midnight and the COBOL starts to leak memory into the void, there’s only one number to call.

And Colin doesn’t pick up. He’s gone fishing. Or worse, he’s retired.

The Real Problem: The Graveyard Shift

Let's be frank: the average COBOL developer isn’t just close to retirement, they’re nearing historical status. These are the people who cut their teeth on punchcards, not Python APIs. Universities haven’t seriously offered COBOL coursework since the last millennium, if at all. As of now, COBOL is almost invisible in UK higher education, surviving in the ether of old curricula and memory.

Meanwhile, on the jobs market, COBOL roles are vanishingly rare: they accounted for just 0.03% of permanent IT vacancies in England in the six months to July 2025, down from 0.12% a year earlier. That translates to only 18 advertised permanent roles, with a median annual salary around £80,000, more or less on par with other senior tech jobs, but with a shrinking ladder beneath it. Contract rates vary, but can reach up to £725/day in the top percentile, a reflection of scarcity, not sustainability.

Young tech pros under 40 have zero appetite for COBOL. It’s not sexy, there’s no startup capital, and the job ads never say “cool, trendy, agile dev environment.” Convincing someone to drop their TikTok filters and AI side projects for a green-screen terminal is like trying to sell them a VHS player.

Those over 70? They’ve done their duty. Many still keep going out of habit, sense of responsibility or just inertia. The only reason HMRC’s payroll still works is because the skeletal remains of COBOL logic will shut down the entire benefits system if anyone pulls the plug. Rewrite? Disaster. Let it rot? Catastrophe.

Post-Brexit made things worse. The foreign pipeline for legacy specialists, once plumbed into EU hiring, dried up overnight. Re-skilling someone who already codes in Kubernetes, Node, and ten AI copilots to think in COBOL divisions, JCL, and label sequences? You’d have better luck teaching a cat to type.

Talent Pipeline: Training the Next Generation (Abroad)

So what’s the plan? Easy, train a new generation of COBOL devs. Just not here. India, for example, is sitting on a goldmine of legacy tech talent. Thanks to decades of outsourcing contracts, many developers there are already familiar with COBOL, mainframes, and systems that predate the Spice Girls. Institutions like NIIT and NASSCOM could scale up training if the UK government offered the right incentives.

This isn’t just theory. The private sector already relies on Indian developers for maintaining COBOL-based banking systems. Extending this to the public sector is simply a matter of visas, security clearances, and a stomach for newspaper headlines.

The more politically digestible option? Train them in India, bring them here via skilled worker visas, and place them inside UK departments. The Home Office just needs to admit COBOL is a 'shortage occupation', which it clearly is. Failing that, hybrid models can allow Indian developers to work remotely in sandboxed environments, while UK-based staff manage production systems.

Will this solve the problem overnight? No. But it’s better than the current approach: waiting for Colin to die and hoping the system doesn’t go with him.

Conclusion: We’re All Colin Now

The UK's digital infrastructure is running on fumes, prayers, and Colin’s last backup tape. The final line of defence is a generation of unsung warlocks who speak fluent FORTRAN, debug with print statements, and think Slack is what happens to your knees when you get old.

So next time your benefit payment arrives, or your bank balance updates, thank an old man, or woman, with a CRT monitor and a worn-out keyboard. Because the real IT heroes aren’t in Silicon Roundabout, they’re in their sheds, navigating punched-card logic with a cup of instant coffee and a grudge against decimal points.

These Colins kept Britain online through Y2K, SARS, COVID, and several dozen Whitehall “digital transformation” initiatives that went precisely nowhere. They carried entire institutions on their backs with no recognition and even less documentation.

There’s a light at the end of the tunnel, slowly, haltingly, a new generation is waking up to the reality that not everything important comes with an API. But we’re not there yet.

Until then, we salute you, Colin. May your backups be clean, your stack traces short, and your retirement forever postponed.

God help us when you go.