The Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) completed a two-year project to bring IT services back in-house last month, Computer Weekly has reported.

The DVLA’s outsourcing strategy – set up while Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister – has existed for over 20 years, yet it only took CEO Oliver Morley a few days to make the decision to backsource the organisation’s IT after he joined in 2013. The claim is that this project will save at least £225 million over the course of 10 years, along with an extra £70 million saved in procurement costs.

Iain Patterson, the current CTO at the DVLA who will soon move back to the Cabinet Office, explained: “We looked at the architecture and the cost of standing still, which we estimated to be in excess of £230 million, and to run a procurement programme would have cost £80 million.

“For the most part we are doing it ourselves but we have plenty of partners – big and small – still with us, who will be doing a large part of the work. But we have the relationship directly with them, we coordinate delivery, we have mixed development teams and it is very important we own the overall model.”

The DVLA is the UK’s second biggest organisation for collecting direct debit payment, with larger UK revenues than even Amazon. Oliver Morley believes that, despite backsourcing, the DVLA is transitioning to digital at a rapid pace, with at least 90 per cent of its customers making use of the DVLA’s digital services.

“I would put us against anyone in the public and private sectors in terms of how much digital transformation we have done,” Morley said.

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Related: How the UK’s police will cut down its £1 billion-a-year IT costs