Question to the Department for Business and Trade:

To ask the Secretary of State for Business and Trade, what steps his Department is taking to increase interoperability and competitiveness in the domestic cloud market following recent widespread outages caused by dominant providers in the industry.

Answered by Kate Dearden - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Business and Trade)

In July 2025, the Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) published its final report on the UK cloud market. The key recommendation was for the CMA Board to prioritise commencing investigations under the digital markets regime and to consider designating the two largest providers —Microsoft and AWS — with strategic market status in relation to cloud services. The CMA is independent of Government and any decisions on initiating strategic market status investigations are for the CMA Board.

Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, what estimate her Department has made of the cost to the economy of recent outages of large-scale cloud providers.

Answered by James Murray - Chief Secretary to the Treasury

I refer the member to the answer given to UIN 92928 on 24 November 2025.