The government needs to make more use of open source software instead of relying on large foreign firms such as Microsoft, an MP has said.

A move away from proprietary systems such as Windows would allow greater competition and could save the government as much as five per cent on its IT procurement bill, Liberal Democrat MP John Pugh claimed during a parliamentary debate on Wednesday.

Although there were various policies in favour of open source solutions, the UK was falling behind the private sector and other EU government in its use of such software, he said.

Instead, many departments had a “tendency to have memorandums of understanding with big companies, often foreign and usually American,” Pugh explained.

The Lib Dem member of the Commons public accounts committee, which has reported on many government IT projects, said there was a “close association” between the computing giant and the government.

Pugh cited Tony Blair’s launch of the Labour business manifesto at Microsoft and Bill Gates’ membership of the international business advisory business council, also established by Blair.

The MP cited examples of the firms’ dominance such as the Department for Work and Pensions online benefits system and a Driving Standards Agency CD-Rom which could only be accessed by Windows users.

But Treasury minister Angela Eagle insisted that the government was committed to investing in software that had interoperability, including open source software.

“We have made increasing use of open source software, which is now playing a key role in the delivery of some of our most high-profile IT projects,” she said, citing the Directgov and DVLA sites as examples.

“It is for the government to get the best software and IT possible for each procurement, so that we can give people the best service and the best value,” she added. “If open source software can help to achieve that, I want to see the government use more of it.”

But, she warned MPs, it was not clear that open source was necessarily cheaper than other software systems because the free licence could be counterbalanced by higher support and training costs.

There could also be issues with security and quality, Eagle said, and in many cases, the industry had not provided open source solutions when government contracts were put out to tender.

Closing the debate, she offered a challenge to the open source industry: “We will procure the solution that can offer the best value for money and that can best meet our requirements: high quality, reliability, security and more specific criteria in each case as the contracts are designed. If that solution is open source, we will use open source,” she promised.