PLANS to spend almost £2million on replacing Blackburn with Darwen Council staff laptops have been approved.

The council’s executive board rubber stamped the £1.875m plan when it met at Blakcburn town hall on Thursday, with cash to be drawn from the authority’s earmarked ICT capital reserve fund across 2018/19 and 2019/20.

The project to replace devices is set to begin in September and would see 2,100 devices replaced over two years.

A total of £1.5m would be spent on the devices and accessories while the remaining £300,000 would go towards staff costs.

Council bosses say the majority of devices are now between four and six years old and are not covered under warranty, with many of them having reached the point where they are no longer fit for purpose and are costing the authority time and money in maintenan

Provision for the scheme was included within the ICT Capital Earmarked Reserve for 2018-2021 as part of the capital programme approved at Finance Council in February.

Council resources chief, Cllr Andy Kay, said: “Machines are current at the end or beyond their life and the majority are not capable of being upgraded to Windows 10.

“At some stage over the next couple of years we have got to invest not only because our hardware is out of date but because we need to meet security criteria.”

Members are gave the green light to proposals to spend another £950,000 upgrading infrastructure including £140,000 on internal firewalls and £250,000 on Wi-Fi.

And plans to spend a six-figure sum developing a new website were also ratified

The £141,551 one-off cost include an estimated cost of £35,000 for work to associated third party websites such as planning and online payments, and for safety testing.

There will be costs of £24,313 for staff time for the duration of the project which will be accommodated within existing budgets.

Cllr Kay said: “The council’s existing website has been in place now for six years and is in need of updating, the existing IT infrastructure also needs upgrading and therefore it was identified as an opportunity to look

at options for the website moving forwards.”