Still Faxing in 2025? The UK Councils Stuck in a Time Warp

Written By Noel Bradford

It’s 2025. Artificial Intelligence writes your press releases. Your smartwatch detects early signs of heart attacks. Zero Trust architecture is no longer a buzzword but a minimum expectation. And yet, somewhere deep inside a UK council office, a fax machine whirs into life.

A shriek, a beep, a grinding of gears. A sheet of confidential data, freshly printed, drops into a dusty output tray.

No audit trail. No encryption. No authentication. No clue.

And no, this isn’t some sitcom cold open. This is very real, very current, and deeply problematic.

A Dying Technology Refusing to Die

Fax machines with VHS tapes, pagers, and Ask Jeeves should have been left behind. Yet, according to a wave of recent FOI responses, hundreds of UK public sector bodies, including councils, NHS Trusts, and legal bodies, still rely on them.

In some cases, they’re used daily—for medical records, housing appeals, safeguarding information, and legal correspondence—all sent on a glorified photocopier with a phone line.

Despite the NHS announcing a ban in 2020, many councils quietly clung on to them. And where one department retires its machine, another insists on keeping it "for redundancy."

The logic? Misguided at best. Dangerous at worst.

The Comfort Blanket of Bureaucracy

Let’s be brutally honest. Fax machines are still around for one reason: institutional inertia.

Change means risk. Risk means blame. And blame in the public sector is a hot potato no one wants to hold. So instead of modernising, councils tinker around the edges. They digitise a few forms, add portal access, and quietly keep the fax machine on standby.

Just in case.

Some departments fear moving away from faxes because their "partner organisations still require them." In other words, “We’d modernise, but the other lot won’t.” So everyone waits for someone else to blink first.

We end up with a broken chain of digital transformation, with the fax machine acting as the analogue glue between otherwise modern systems. It’s absurd.

Yes, there are multiple cases of companies printing out a document, then faxing it, and, I am taking a deep breath here, the recipient scanning the received document to a PDF and uploading it to some system or another.

The Myths Councils Tell Themselves

Ask anyone in a local authority why they still use fax, and you’ll hear one or more of these:

  • “It’s more secure because it’s analogue.”

  • “It’s faster than email.”

  • “It gives us a paper trail.”

  • “It’s required for legal compliance.”

None of these hold up.

Fax is not secure. It offers zero encryption, can easily be misdialled, and once printed, sits on a tray where anyone can read it. Compare that to modern end-to-end encrypted email systems, digital portals with MFA, and tools with logging and DLP capabilities.

Faxing is not fast. The transmission is slow and error-prone, and if the line is busy or the machine is out of paper, it fails silently.

Fax does not create a reliable audit trail. There's no verifiable logging, access control, or assurance of delivery.

Fax is not legally required ANYWHERE. Courts and legal institutions have long since adopted secure email and electronic document submission systems. The Law Society itself discourages fax reliance. Not only discourages, but how about an all-out ban?

So, we have a technology that is slower, riskier, and less auditable than every alternative, yet is still actively used to handle some of the most sensitive data imaginable.

The Real-World Impact

This isn’t just an IT rant. This has real-world consequences.

Misfired Faxes: Sensitive data sent to the wrong number because someone fat-fingered a digit. Shared Machines: Anyone walking by a fax machine can grab confidential data. Lack of Verification: No way to verify who picked up the document or whether it was received at all. No Redundancy: Unlike email, if a fax fails, it doesn’t always retry. It just fails.

In one infamous case, a council accidentally faxed safeguarding documents about a vulnerable child to a car dealership. There was no encryption, no recall function, just oops.

In another, a care home admitted to faxing medical prescriptions to a pharmacy, only to find that the number now belonged to a local pub. After reading the faxes, the barman shredded them.

This is not hypothetical. This is what happens when outdated tech meets human error.

Cybersecurity? What Cybersecurity?

In an era when ransomware is hammering councils weekly, any non-secure communication channel would be shut down immediately. Yet, the fax endures.

The NCSC has repeatedly warned local governments that they are high-value targets. Sensitive data, financial transactions, and service delivery are all attractive to criminals. And still, some councils are beaming data out over insecure copper lines like it’s 1986.

What’s worse, these faxes often contain information that would be extremely valuable to attackers: names, addresses, medical histories, and case numbers, the kind of details that can be weaponised for phishing, blackmail, or social engineering.

Fax machines are not just outdated. They are liabilities.

The Audit Trail Farce

Let’s talk about accountability. In a digital system, every action can be traced—who sent it, who read it, when they read it, and what IP address they used. That is the baseline expectation in 2025.

Fax machines? You get a "sent confirmation" sheet that says nothing about who received the document. It’s like sending a pigeon and assuming it got there because it hasn’t returned.

And when something does go wrong? Good luck proving it wasn’t received. Or that it wasn’t intercepted. Or that someone didn’t walk past and grab it. There is no trail. There is only guesswork.

A Culture of Avoidance

Why don’t councils kill off the fax once and for all? Because doing so would force them to modernise the systems that rely on it.

And that’s expensive.

It would mean replacing legacy software, retraining staff, upgrading network infrastructure, and embracing proper security hygiene. In other words, doing what private businesses have been doing for the past 15 years.

It’s not that the public sector lacks capable people. It’s that it lacks empowered ones. Too often, council IT staff know the risks and know the fixes, but they are told to "make do" until the next budget cycle.

Sometimes, fax is maintained because it's in the tender spec. Suppliers are expected to support it because the authority hasn’t updated its requirements in a decade.

That’s not just embarrassing. It’s reckless.

Death by Procurement

Let’s not forget that procurement plays a massive role in this. Many councils still list fax capabilities as required when purchasing new systems. Vendors maintain fax support not because it's needed, but because it's specified.

This is how you end up with modern, secure document management platforms bolted onto fax-enabled backends because of a checkbox on a 2014 form.

Procurement is meant to be a tool for innovation and efficiency. Instead, it’s become why we’re stuck in an analogue quagmire.

On this point, manufacturers, you’re Not Off the Hook Either

Printer manufacturers are also part of the problem. In 2025, there is no reasonable justification for including fax capabilities in new models. Yet many still do, perpetuating a dead standard under the guise of "enterprise continuity" or "legacy support."

Keeping fax functions alive in their product lines gives the public sector an excuse not to evolve. It’s time for vendors to take responsibility. Stop supporting outdated technology that creates a backdoor into otherwise secure environments.

After all, a fax-enabled printer is just a small, rarely patched semi-smart device attached to a phone line via a modem and your network.

Analogue Switch-Off Is Coming

The physical infrastructure is vanishing even if councils want to cling to fax machines. The UK’s analogue switch-off, planned as part of the move to all-digital networks by the end of 2027, means that traditional PSTN and ISDN lines will be shut down. That includes the copper lines fax machines rely on.

This is not some future risk. It is a hard deadline.

When the analogue lines go dark, those faxes will go nowhere. Unless councils act now, they risk operational failures, lost data, and an embarrassing scramble to modernise under duress.

The writing is not just on the wall. It was faxed one last time.

What Needs to Happen (But Probably Won’t)

Ban fax in government, flat out. Audit and decommission all legacy systems reliant on fax. Update procurement policies to reflect modern security requirements. Retrain staff to use secure platforms. Pressure manufacturers to stop including fax support in new MFPs. Plan now for the analogue switch-off, not later, but. Appoint someone with actual authority to see it through.

This isn’t a technical problem. It’s a leadership one.

You don’t need to be an IT expert to know that printing off confidential data and sticking it on a shared tray is a terrible idea. All you need is common sense.

The Bottom Line

Every day that a council uses a fax machine is another day that public data is at unnecessary risk.

We’ve spent years talking about digital transformation. We’ve had taxpayer-funded white papers, vision strategies, and funding rounds. And yet, in dusty corners of local government, we’re still clinging to a communications method that predates email.

The fax machine is not quaint, reliable, or secure. It is the IT equivalent of asbestos, tolerated far too long and quietly poisoning everything it touches.

It’s time to stop pretending. Rip the cord out, smash it with a hammer, and recycle the parts.

And then, finally, we can say we’ve joined the 21st century.

Want help retiring your last fax machine and securing your council’s communication stack? Start with the basics. Encryption, secure portals, and accountability. And if you want to do it properly, maybe talk to someone who knows what Zero Trust means, not just how to spell it.

Noel Bradford

Noel Bradford – Head of Technology at Equate Group, Professional Bullshit Detector, and Full-Time IT Cynic

As Head of Technology at Equate Group, my job description is technically “keeping the lights on,” but in reality, it’s more like “stopping people from setting their own house on fire.” With over 40 years in tech, I’ve seen every IT horror story imaginable—most of them self-inflicted by people who think cybersecurity is just installing antivirus and praying to Saint Norton.

I specialise in cybersecurity for UK businesses, which usually means explaining the difference between ‘MFA’ and ‘WTF’ to directors who still write their passwords on Post-it notes. On Tuesdays, I also help further education colleges navigate Cyber Essentials certification, a process so unnecessarily painful it makes root canal surgery look fun.

My natural habitat? Server rooms held together with zip ties and misplaced optimism, where every cable run is a “temporary fix” from 2012. My mortal enemies? Unmanaged switches, backups that only exist in someone’s imagination, and users who think clicking “Enable Macros” is just fine because it makes the spreadsheet work.

I’m blunt, sarcastic, and genuinely allergic to bullshit. If you want gentle hand-holding and reassuring corporate waffle, you’re in the wrong place. If you want someone who’ll fix your IT, tell you exactly why it broke, and throw in some unsolicited life advice, I’m your man.

Technology isn’t hard. People make it hard. And they make me drink.

https://noelbradford.com
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