Question to the Home Office:

To ask the Secretary of State for the Home Department, how many and what proportion of her Department’s cloud-hosting contracts have been awarded to (a) hyperscale cloud providers and (b) UK SMEs; and what the value of those contracts was in each of the last three years.

The Home Office has a number of cloud hosting contracts, with a variety of service providers.

It is our policy to award contracts on the basis of value for money, whilst doing everything we can to encourage UK suppliers, and UK SME's in particular, to win business. This is achieved through competitive tender in accordance with public procurement legislation.The Home Office actively encourages SMEs to bid for Government contracts and where applicable include relevant clauses in our terms and conditions and tender process to encourage UK suppliers to use SMEs within their supply chain.

The Home Office has a number of cloud hosting contracts with hypercloud providers, such as Amazon Web Services, Oracle Fusion and Microsoft Azure, as well as contracts with Vodafone, DXC, SCC and UKCloud. The Department has a number of smaller hosting contracts, with a wide variety of UK-based and we utilise the services of other hosting providers through our extended service integrator supplier base.