Question to the Department of Health and Social Care:

To ask the Secretary of State for Health and Social Care, how many and what proportion of his 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 Department has contracts in place for software as a service for business functionality with suppliers who deliver business solutions and services. These contracts are not solely for cloud-hosting, and software suppliers offer a range of services as part of such contracts. The value of these contracts is for the full service not just for cloud-hosting.

The Department's central procurement system does not have a separate category for cloud-hosting contracts nor any central means of consistently identifying cloud-hosting services. To provide a comprehensive list would mean going back to each business area and Directorate in the Department and consulting with them extensively on which of the contracts they have commissioned are to be considered to be cloud-hosting. This would incur disproportionate cost to produce.