[chrisseaton]

Do you realise this is the government building software for the government?

That's like complaining that Amazon have a monopoly on hosting Amazon services.

> A sensible approach would have been a list of certified service providers and contact points for contracting.

No let's not for example ask the Forestry Commission to build or contract their own cloud services... that's not what they know about or what they're going to be good at.

[hugoromano]

In this case Gov.UK PaaS has a single vendor, AWS. I am in favour of multiple options, multiple vendors. The certification can be done by Gov UK agency that guarantees vendors up to spec. The current model "Forestry Commission" still needs to build, develop, define spec, buy and pay Gov.UK PaaS.