Amazon Web Services

Lord Clement-Jones Excerpts

Tuesday 21st October 2025 Lords Chamber

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

My Lords, in respect of the noble Viscount’s point about cost, this happened just yesterday so, of course, we are still working it through; it will take us some time to evaluate how much it will cost the economy. I am sure that economists will be kept very busy for some time working out the costs and the impact on productivity.

We are already taking steps to strengthen the resilience of the UK’s digital infrastructure. Through the national cyber strategy and the national resilience framework, we are working with the National Cyber Security Centre to treat major cloud service providers as part of our critical national infrastructure. This includes measures to ensure that they have robust redundancy back-up and incident response capabilities in place. At the same time, we are consulting with industry on enhanced incident reporting and transparency requirements so that the Government can be alerted immediately to any service disruption that could have national impact.

[Lord Clement-Jones (LD)]

My Lords, at the very least, this should be a wake-up call for the Government. It is clear that the Government have been overdependent on two US cloud service providers, which, as the Competition and Markets Authority says, have 70% to 90% of the market, and restrictive practices impede competition. Of course, there is now a sovereign AI unit within DSIT. Will government procurement policy now change to encourage UK cloud service providers, which would then help to deliver sovereign AI? Will the Government also encourage the CMA to act rapidly, given this lack of competition?

[Lord Leong (Lab)]

I thank the noble Lord for those points. The Government are aware and are taking cybersecurity seriously. That is why we have published a number of strategies and are working with the National Cyber Security Centre, as I mentioned earlier. The noble Lord also mentioned procurement and the service providers. The three providers I just mentioned—Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud—probably have something like 60% of the market share. Yes, we have other small, independent providers as well but, at the same time, procurement is dependent on government departments: on how they want to procure their services and from where. The basic point is that, going forward, we have to ensure that it is safe and resilient.