UK government inflates G-Cloud framework to £14B

Procurement delays and lock-in fears see framework balloon in size and scope

The UK government has launched a competition for cloud services worth up to £14 billion over four years – nearly triple the £4.8 billion over 18 months announced in an earlier market engagement.

The Crown Commercial Service (CCS), a branch of the Cabinet Office, opened the G-Cloud 15 tender last week to provide cloud infrastructure, platform, and hosting services across the public sector.

The tender notice says the deal is expected to be in place from September next year until September 2030. The agreement is expected to include cloud compute, which was previously available under a different framework.

Pegged at a maximum of £14 billion (excluding VAT) over four years, the framework's value and timeframe have swollen since an earlier market engagement, which estimated it to be worth up to £4.8 billion and run for 18 months from March 2026.

The expansion comes as UK public sector cloud spending reached £6 billion in 2024, according to the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology. Government spending under the previous G-Cloud 14 framework totaled £3.1 billion in FY 2023/24.

In July, the government extended two major cloud framework deals due to procurement delays for G-Cloud 15 frameworks, creating an additional £1.65 billion in potential spending.

The likely multibillion-pound spending on cloud services comes as the government grapples with creating a competitive market.

In April last year, The Register revealed officials admitted negotiating power over billions of pounds of cloud infrastructure spending has been inhibited by vendor lock-in.

A paper from the Central Digital & Data Office – which was part of the Cabinet Office and is now merged with the GDS in DSIT – said the government's approach to cloud adoption resulted in "risk concentration and vendor lock-in that inhibit UK government's negotiating power over the cloud vendors."

In February, Andrew Forzani, chief commercial officer in the Cabinet Office, told a Parliamentary spending watchdog that if the government wanted to use its spending power to strike better deals with the top cloud providers, individual departments needed to improve how they aligned their requirements. ®