G-Cloud purchases by local government made another steady rise during January – up 12% on December.
Figures released by the Cabinet Office yesterday that purchases in the local authority category, which includes councils, housing associations and other local public bodies, rose from £1.49m in December to £1.67m.
The rise is the second in a row within the category, but sales are still some way short of the £2.53m sales recorded in April 2015.
Local government made 206 individual purchases during the month, up from 178 the previous month.
More than a quarter of purchases by value in the category again came from Bristol City Council, which spent £348,500 on 42 purchases.
The largest purchase by local government in December was by Southampton City Council, which spent £56,000 on specialist cloud services from platform supplier Firmstep, a trading name of supplier Business Web Software.
The January figures also exclude a set of purchases by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This is the third consecutive month that sales from the central government department appear to have been mistakenly added to the local government category.
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The figures showed that 78% of sales by value and 76% by volume in the local government category went to small and medium enterprises. This is a far higher share than the overall cumulative total sales for government, which were again just over £1bn in January.
Since the G-Cloud was launched, 52% of total sales by value and 62% by volume have been awarded to SMEs.
