Asked by: Samantha Niblett (Labour - South Derbyshire)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what actions she will take to address restrictive software licensing practices by dominant cloud providers, as identified by the CMA, to ensure fair competition in the cloud services market.
Answered by Kanishka Narayan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
The Government is committed to supporting a competitive and innovative digital economy. This is why we prioritised the commencement of the Competition and Markets Authority’s (the CMA) new powers in digital markets. The CMA is independent of Government, and any decisions on which markets it investigates is for their Board.
Asked by: Samantha Niblett (Labour - South Derbyshire)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what steps the Government is taking to ensure greater competition, interoperability, and diversity in the UK cloud market, in light of successive large-scale outages from Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
Answered by Kanishka Narayan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
In July, the Competition and Markets Authority (the CMA) recommended their board prioritise a future Strategic Market Status investigation into competition in the cloud market. The CMA is independent of Government and any decisions on which markets it investigates is for their Board.
Asked by: Samantha Niblett (Labour - South Derbyshire)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what steps her Department is taking to ensure that the Competition and Markets Authority accelerates the Digital Markets Unit strategic market status designation process for cloud services.
Answered by Kanishka Narayan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
The Competition and Markets Authority (the CMA) has completed 3 Strategic Market Status investigations this year. The CMA is independent of the Government and decisions on which markets to investigate is for their Board. The CMA has published guidance on its website on how it will prioritise Strategic Market Status designations.
Asked by: Samantha Niblett (Labour - South Derbyshire)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what assessment her Department has made of the systemic risks posed to the UK economy and critical services by reliance on two dominant hyperscale cloud providers, following recent outages on Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services.
Answered by Kanishka Narayan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Science, Innovation and Technology)
The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) continues to monitor systemic risks to UK critical national infrastructure from reliance on cloud providers, including resilience measures and contingency planning following recent service outages. DSIT works closely with each cloud provider during and after any incident to ensure improved resilience and lessons learnt are shared across Government. For example, following earlier global digital resilience incidents, we are working to strengthen our capability to coordinate this kind of incident across Government.
Government recommends that public sector organisations adopt a multi-region approach, in which they make controlled, considered use of regions in a way which is compatible with UK law. This helps improve resilience by removing the reliance on any one region.
DSIT will publish the Government Cyber Action Plan this Winter, which sets out a clear approach for Government and the public sector to manage cyber security and resilience incidents impacting Government services.
Government also recognises the importance of robust protections for the services essential to our society and economy – that is why we introduced the Cyber Security and Resilience Bill on 12 November.
Asked by: Samantha Niblett (Labour - South Derbyshire)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, pursuant to the Answer of 4 June 2025 to Question 55786 on Public Sector: Digital Technology, whether his Department’s digital transformation strategy will include the (a) financial impact of software assets on departmental budgets and (b) impact of identified dependencies on those assets on cost efficiencies.
Answered by Feryal Clark
The State of Digital Government review, A blueprint for modern digital government and the Performance Review of Digital Spend, all published this year, have highlighted the need to reform digital purchasing.
The Government has launched a Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence, containing experts from the Digital and Commercial Functions, within the Government Digital Service (GDS) in my department. It is pursuing multiple strategies to improve value for money and outcomes including central buying of commodity services, development of a digital sourcing strategy, creation of technical enablers and joined-up management of strategic digital suppliers.
Asked by: Samantha Niblett (Labour - South Derbyshire)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, pursuant to the Answer of 4 June 2025 to Question 55785 on Public Sector: Digital Technology, what discussions his Department has had with the Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence on the impact of software licensing for Government software procurement on the digital transformation strategy.
Answered by Feryal Clark
The State of Digital Government review, A blueprint for modern digital government and the Performance Review of Digital Spend, all published this year, have highlighted the need to reform digital purchasing.
The Government has launched a Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence, containing experts from the Digital and Commercial Functions, within the Government Digital Service (GDS) in my department. It is pursuing multiple strategies to improve value for money and outcomes including central buying of commodity services, development of a digital sourcing strategy, creation of technical enablers and joined-up management of strategic digital suppliers.
Asked by: Samantha Niblett (Labour - South Derbyshire)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what steps his Department is taking to support (a) the Health Innovation Network and (b) other regional networks to help (i) support health technology SMEs and (ii) increase economic growth.
Answered by Feryal Clark
The Government continues to fund the Health Innovation Network to support health and social care teams to identify, test, and scale new solutions – including new health technologies – to major NHS challenges. Since 2018, HIN programmes have created or secured over 10,000 jobs and provided bespoke support to thousands of SME innovators, contributing >£2.6bn to UK economy with a 3:1 return on investment.
Other Government-funded regional networks include the NIHR Research Delivery Network, which enables the health and care system to attract, optimise and deliver research across England. This includes supporting the delivery of research funded by health technology SMEs.
Asked by: Samantha Niblett (Labour - South Derbyshire)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what assessment he has made of the impact of (a) usage, (b) year-over-year spend and (c) potential dependencies of the Government's current software assets on cost efficiencies.
Answered by Feryal Clark
His Majesty's Government monitors the usage of individual and enterprise licenses across a wide variety of products
Asked by: Samantha Niblett (Labour - South Derbyshire)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what assessment has been made of the potential impact of restrictive software licensing on the ability to achieve the digital transformation of public services.
Answered by Feryal Clark
Government procures software via a number of agreed frameworks which are tendered via the Crown Commercial Service and are awarded under the relevant procurement regulations. The introduction of the new procurement act 2023 will provide government with an ability to consider how such services are contracted in the future.
The creation of the Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence is overseeing the development of sourcing/category strategies to co-ordinate how we shape demand, drive down usage and optmise the way such assets are used. This work is currently underway.
Asked by: Samantha Niblett (Labour - South Derbyshire)
Question to the Department for Science, Innovation & Technology:
To ask the Secretary of State for Science, Innovation and Technology, what steps he is taking to support the technology industry in adopting data-led practices to improve diversity in the sector; and whether the Department plans to support an industry diversity accreditation scheme.
Answered by Feryal Clark
The Government is committed to promoting diversity in the tech sector and is doing so in a number of ways. DSIT is supporting the Tech Future Taskforce on Social Mobility, which includes helping companies to collect and act upon data to promote tech workforce diversity. As committed in the AI Opportunities Action Plan, DfE and DSIT will collaborate with industry to publish a plan to improve the diversity of the AI talent pool.
More widely, the Employment Rights Bill and Equality (Race and Disability) Bill will strengthen reporting and action on gender, race and disability by large companies, which includes tech companies.