Recommendation 31

The Cabinet Office is responsible for maximising the buying power of the state. We therefore asked the Cabinet Office how government could negotiate volume discounts with large suppliers or cloud suppliers, or aggregated contracts, without data on the expected future demand which GCF has been unable to do in the past. DSIT recognised that the data “gets weaker as we go out in forecast”. It told us that it would work with departments to get much stronger forecast data, using both investment forecasts from the upcoming Spending Review, and operational trends. It recognised that what people may be spending now, for example on AI solutions, will “not tell us perfectly what they are spending in the future unless we actually track that”. Nevertheless, without reliable information about future demand, government will find it harder to fully make use of its consolidated buying power because it will not know how much it can commit to spending in the future in order to secure the best deals. It explained that part of the work going forward would be to add forecast data and build a reliable forecast for digital spending but recognised that this would be difficult.54 Making best use of government’s buying power