UK's 'buy British' tech ambitions hit reality as less than £1 in £6 stays at home
The UK government talks a good game about buying British, but less than £1 in every £6 spent with its biggest technology suppliers goes to British firms, according to research exposing how much Whitehall relies on foreign tech.
Key points
- The UK should be working with other middle powers, pooling our buying power to shape markets and using shared leverage to secure access to frontier AI." Darren Jones MP, who wrote the report's foreword, made a similar argument, saying Britain should work with international allies rather than attempting to build everything itself.
- According to IPPR, 89.9 percent of government IT contracts over the past 12 months had no published record of how many suppliers bid for the work, making it difficult to assess how competitive those procurements were.
- One example is NHS England's rollout of Microsoft 365 Copilot to 505,000 staff, which IPPR says was carried out under a national licensing agreement signed in June 2023, before Copilot was even generally available.
And with AI already bundled into software contracts worth billions, US tech giants aren't making it easy for the government to shop elsewhere.
Additional details
- That means AI tools can reach hundreds of thousands of public sector workers through deals negotiated before those products were on the market, potentially leaving rival suppliers without an opportunity to compete.
- The report, Locked In: A Realist's Agenda for Digital Sovereignty, warns that Britain's dependence on American technology could become particularly troublesome if Washington restricts access to advanced AI systems.
- Instead, they want Whitehall to negotiate technology contracts as a single customer, make it easier to switch suppliers, and work with countries including France, Germany, Japan, and South Korea to secure access to advanced AI.
- A report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) found that while 42.5 percent of spending with the public sector's 150 largest technology suppliers appears to go to UK companies, that figure collapses to just 15.4 percent once you look beyond where those businesses happen to be headquartered.
- The government has already committed £500 million to a Sovereign AI Fund, but researchers reckon throwing money at homegrown technology companies won't be enough to loosen Silicon Valley's grip.
How this summary was made: extractive summary — built from the sources' own reporting. It is drawn only from the reporting of the sources listed below — read the originals for full detail. How we summarize →
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