While it was supposed to encourage small suppliers to bid for government contracts, bigger suppliers still managed to snaffle more than half of the G-Cloud contracts.
Large suppliers have taken 53 percent of the £2.4 billion spending all spending through G-Cloud and account for the lion’s share of spend through G-Cloud, according to figures from Crown Commercial Service (CCS) released today.
This is a significant jump on the 44 percent of spend large suppliers accounted for when CCS released data in January, when the overall sales figure stood at £1.7 billion.
A Cabinet Office spokesperson suggested that at least some of the difference could be explained by the fact that some SME suppliers on G-Cloud were reclassified following their expansion.
“We have improved the way we manage our data and we know that a number of suppliers have grown beyond SME status over the reporting period”, the spokesman said.
“Today we published figures that show SMEs have delivered over £1.2 billion of cloud and digital services for government and the public sector since 2012. This means that almost half of digital spend, or £1.39 in every £3, is going to SMEs – giving a major boost to the technology SME sector.”
It is also possible that larger suppliers are now beginning to take the government’s frameworks more seriously.
Larger suppliers had avoided the frameworks because they were public and that would mean showing their price lists to the public domain.
