The UK government talks a good game about buying British, but less than £1 in every £6 spent with its biggest technology suppliers goes to British firms, according to research exposing how much Whitehall relies on foreign tech. A report from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) found that while 42. 5 percent of spending with the public sector’s 150 largest technology suppliers appears to go to UK companies, that figure collapses to just 15. 4 percent once you look beyond where those businesses happen to be headquartered. A UK headquarters doesn’t necessarily make a company British. Some are owned from overseas, others have most of their staff abroad, and many simply resell technology from US giants such as Microsoft. In fact, 43 percent of the spending attributed to UK-headquartered suppliers goes to resellers. Bytes and Softcat alone account for around £2 billion, making them two of the three biggest recipients of public sector technology spending. Once researchers traced reseller contracts back to the companies behind the products, the US emerged as the biggest beneficiary, accounting for £9. 2 billion of the £19. 2 billion spent with the largest suppliers. And the money isn’t exactly being spread around. Just 150 companies receive 83 percent of public sector technology spending, with the largest 15 accounting for almost half. Smaller suppliers aren’t getting much of a look-in either, receiving just 12 percent of government technology spending compared with 27 percent of spending across government as a whole. Competition is another concern. According to IPPR, 89. 9 percent of government IT contracts over the past 12 months had no published record of how many suppliers bid for the work, making it difficult to assess how competitive those procurements were. Things get murkier when AI enters the picture, naturally. Government spending records show relatively little money going directly to the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic, but that doesn’t mean Whitehall isn’t buying their technology. Much of it is bundled into existing cloud agreements, enterprise software licenses, and partnerships…