Select committee: Public Accounts Committee
Recommendation 14
27th Report - Government’s relationship with digital technology suppliers
Published 6 Jun 2025
Addressed to HM Treasury
Public Accounts Committee Government’s relationship with digital technology suppliers All items in this report Report on parliament.uk ↗ Inquiry on parliament.uk ↗
Recommendation (the committee's words)
We asked how government could manage its relationships with large technology suppliers, particularly given concerns about lack of competition or rising costs.20 DSIT told us that it needed to build government’s capability in some specific areas of digital procurement, as activities such as “buying cloud brilliantly is a quite specific skill, even within the digital procurement set of skills”. GCF said that, as digital was now at the heart of almost every procurement, it needed to do more to build digital commercial skills, and that this was “absolutely” part of what the Centre of Excellence would do. It recognised that much of the more complex digital procurement was undertaken by multidisciplinary teams, so this would need a wider focus 17 Qq 1, 5 18 Qq 15, 20, 41 19 Qq 23, 27–29 20 Qq 27–29 12 than only on commercial teams.21 The Cabinet Office wrote to us after our evidence session to tell us that new systems are predominantly “cloud first” and cloud computing expenditure was likely to always trend upwards to meet the priorities of the business.22
From: Public Accounts Committee, 27th Report - Government’s relationship with digital technology suppliers (HC 640), 6 June 2025
Government response
Latest Treasury Minutes progress report to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Twenty-seventh Report of Session 2024-26
The government responded to the whole report on 4 June 2026 (deadline 6 August 2025).
Treasury minutes: Government response to the Committee of Public Accounts on the Twenty-seventh report from Session 2024-26
Published 18 September 2025.
Summary written by Accountability Index from the government's response. It is not the government's own words.The government states that it "agrees with the Committee's recommendation" on each of the recommendations in the report, with most carrying a target implementation date of December 2025.
- On roles and responsibilities, it says the Digital Commercial Centre of Excellence (DCCoE) has been launched as a joint Cabinet Office and DSIT team and is "working to formalise the roles and responsibilities" between digital and commercial teams.
- On skills, it sets a three-phased approach for the Government Commercial Function: a first phase by September 2025, a second by March 2026, and a final phase "to be confirmed".
- On the Digital, Data and Technology Playbook, it says a team is working with GDS "to launch a publication in December 2025", bringing it up to date with current practices.
- On spending data, it says the GCF Digital & Data Team "will set out the process" to use commercial insights from data held across government, with "further detail" to be provided to the Committee in December.