Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, if he will publish the rate of cloud adoption for each Government Department as of 27 March 2024.

Answered by Alex Burghart - Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland

The Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) in the Cabinet Office continues to work with departments to promote the best practice adoption of public cloud services, in accordance with Government Cloud First policy that has been extant since 2013. This was refreshed by CDDO in 2023.

The requested information relating to specific departmental adoption rates of public cloud is not currently centrally held.

Question to the Cabinet Office:

To ask the Minister for the Cabinet Office, whether he is taking steps to prevent the fraudulent copying of Government web pages to charge users for services.

Answered by Alex Burghart - Shadow Secretary of State for Northern Ireland

Any misuse of GOV.UK’s brand elements (such as the logo, crown, and Government Digital Service (GDS) Transport typeface) is illegal, and these elements are protected by crown-copyright.

Digital, cyber security and brand protection teams across government work closely with the National Cyber Security Centre to detect and respond to fraudulent sites posing as government, and in doing so to protect the UK public from scams.

A range of monitoring tools and intelligence sources are used to identify these scams, and members of the public are encouraged to report these (e.g., directly to NCSC, or to the relevant government department). Government continues to improve these capabilities, as it will always remain challenging to reliably and rapidly detect all fraudulent sites.

Once detected, multiple techniques can be used to remove these sites from the Internet or otherwise reduce their impact on the public. This includes, but is not limited to, coordinating with industry partners to take down the web domain or remove the underlying systems hosting the site from the Internet, taking direct legal action, or escalating to law enforcement.

Question to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media & Sport:

To ask the Secretary of State for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport, if she has plans to bring forward a UK cloud strategy.

Answered by Julia Lopez - Shadow Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport

In November 2021, DCMS published the National Data Strategy Mission 1 Policy Framework: Unlocking the value of data across the economy, which provides a framework for government action to set the right conditions to make private and third sector data more usable, accessible and available. The Framework identifies seven priority areas for action, three of which contribute to the goal of supporting the development of data sharing infrastructure within the UK. One of these is particularly focused on how the government can support the development of infrastructure that promotes wider economy data sharing for research and development purposes, which could include cloud services.

The recently formed Central Digital and Data Office (CDDO) in the Cabinet Office is also working on standardising the approach that government organisations take to the use of cloud services and data hosting.