The Department for Transport (DfT) has announced that more than half of its suppliers delivering technology services for the High Speed 2 (HS2) railway project are are small or medium businesses.

The DfT was one of the first public sector departments to employ the G-Cloud in order to source SME services, as per government guidelines. The HS2 scheme itself has faced heavy criticism from the media and parliament regarding the cost, impact and practicality of the planned route.

James Findlay, CIO of HS2, said: “We took a bit of a leap of faith because there was no precedent for it. I think we’ve come a long way since then. We’re beginning to see quite an acceleration in the growth of G-Cloud”.

He added, "we’ve got a number of large contracts coming up for renewal. As a consequence, we’re using G-Cloud more, certainly within High Speed 2 [where we were using] 100 percent SMEs.”

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