CMA inaction on cloud competition is costing UK taxpayers more with every passing month

The Competition and Markets Authority has spent considerable time examining the UK public cloud market. It has acknowledged that harm exists. What remains absent, at least for now, is a decision that actually does something about it.

That gap matters more than it might seem on the surface. Public sector organizations across the country, from NHS trusts to local councils to central government departments, operate inside software ecosystems that become harder and more expensive to leave with every passing renewal cycle.

Licensing structures in enterprise technology tend to reward staying put. The longer a public body runs on a single vendor’s platform, the more its workflows, data formats, and staff familiarity anchor it there regardless of whether better or cheaper options exist elsewhere.

The Crown Commercial Service agreement with Microsoft sits at the heart of current concerns. The arrangement covers a substantial portion of government procurement and, while centralized purchasing agreements generally make sense in principle, critics argue this one has contributed to a consolidation of dependency rather than a diversification of options. When contracts renew under existing terms without meaningful competitive pressure, the leverage public sector buyers might otherwise hold simply does not materialize.

The AI dimension adds another layer of complexity to an already tangled picture. Enterprise AI tools increasingly arrive as extensions of existing cloud platforms rather than independent products. An organization already running on Microsoft 365 and Azure faces a structurally easier path toward adopting Copilot than toward evaluating alternatives, not necessarily because Copilot is better, but because the integration friction points elsewhere are real and the switching costs accumulate quickly. Regulatory inaction allows that pull to strengthen unchallenged.

Across the Channel, the European Commission has moved more assertively on cloud competition, pushing for interoperability requirements and measures against practices that effectively trap customers within single-vendor environments. Given the UK’s stated interest in closer digital alignment with European partners, the direction of travel from Brussels carries some relevance to what the CMA ultimately decides.

Public procurement specialists have argued consistently that a clear regulatory outcome would give buying teams something to work with: stronger negotiating positions, clearer grounds for exploring multi-cloud arrangements, and a signal that the current market structure faces genuine scrutiny rather than indefinite review.

Every month that passes without that clarity is a month spent under terms that existing market dynamics, rather than competitive alternatives, have shaped.