UK Government director of innovation and delivery of government digital service Mark O’Neill also said the government would cut off submissions by companies wanting to apply as a supplier of government services.

O’Neil told an audience at the Cloud Expo event in London said that the Government had received more than double the amount of submissions since extending the deadline for submissions from December last year.

At that time it had over 500 applications. Today it has offers of more than 1,600 cloud services.

The government’s G Cloud framework is estimated to cost £60m.

It has plans in the pipeline to consolidate 300 data centers down to a dozen, and just recently hired a new Government CIO – Joe Harley – who has already been involved in a number of government IT projects which have involved cost cutting. (See Ambrose McNevin's blog for more on Harley’s background here)

The UK Government has already cut back on costs by using cloud services for email, collaboration, instant messaging, databases and storage, and O’Neil said he would be reluctant to purchase software for these activities any time in future.