Councils spend more than £30 million on new PCs every year

But they could save money by upgrading instead

Despite spending millions of pounds annually on new computers, almost half of public sector workers spend almost an hour every week helping colleagues with IT issues.

The news comes via a Freedom of Information request by memory and storage company Crucial, which revealed that councils in England, Scotland and Wales have spent £160 million on new computers since the start of 2013 - or £32 million a year.

Over the last five years, councils in Great Britain (275 out of 401 replied to the FoI request) have purchased almost 356,000 PCs and laptops, for a total of £160,173,037. Over the same time period they have disposed of just under 350,000 machines: 213 per day.

Despite this, a separate study by Crucial found that 48 per cent of public sector employees spend up to 10 minutes every day helping co-workers with IT issues, such as a freezing (46 per cent) or crashing (38 per cent) programme or PC, an inability to get online (24 per cent) and losing unsaved work (23 per cent). The most common fixes were calling IT support (32 per cent) or just restarting the PC (23 per cent).

"There is an incorrect perception that due to the fast-evolving nature of technology, systems cannot last long, but if you make some small changes to your existing systems you will see a dramatic increase in speed and efficiency," said Crucial senior product marketing manager Jonathan Weech. "If rather than having other problems we assume that these PCs [that councils binned] had slowed down, then upgrading those machines would be cheaper than buying brand new ones."