£102.6 million has been released by the UK Government to support public service transformation in Northern Ireland.

This funding marks the final allocation of the £235 million transformation fund provided to the Northern Ireland Executive as part of the restoration package in 2024.

The new package will support six projects across health, communities, finance, and agriculture.

Some £42 million will go towards the ePharmacy Primary Care Digital Reform Programme. This project will replace paper-based prescriptions with a digital process that will enable the electronic transfer of prescriptions to community pharmacies across Northern Ireland. This is expected to dramatically improve services by replacing the manual processing of over 45 million paper prescriptions a year with instant digital transfer.

£6m meanwhile will go to the Department of Finance’s Digital Workplace programme, to modernise records and information management across the Civil Service, to reduce duplication and manual handling, helping to support faster access to information and freeing up staff time for citizen-facing activity.

Speaking as the funding was announced, the Secretary of State Hilary Benn MP said: "This £102.6 million investment is a significant milestone for Northern Ireland, and a clear signal of this Government’s commitment to supporting the Executive to deliver better public services for the people of Northern Ireland.

"At the heart of this funding is a simple goal: making public services work better for the people who rely on them every day. The full allocation of the £235m transformation fund is supporting the framework to transform service delivery for the long term."

Read about the other projects here.