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10
Jul
Killinghall Parish Council takes on Microsoft
Killinghall Parish Council is engaged in a David vs Goliath battle against one of the biggest companies in the world.
The parish council, whose budget is £55,000, has complained to the Competition and Markets Authority about Microsoft, which was co-founded by Bill Gates and is worth £2.15 trillion.
It claims the software giant “creates avoidable financial burdens for small public bodies” by, for example, requiring all 10 members of the parish council to pay a £110 licence fee.
The parish council said:
Our experience demonstrates that, in order to use Microsoft Teams effectively, it is necessary to purchase additional Microsoft services, specifically Microsoft-hosted email accounts.
For our council, consisting of nine councillors and one clerk, this results in an unplanned annual cost of £1,100.
This requirement was not made sufficiently clear at the outset and represents poor value for money, limiting our ability to use public funds efficiently. We believe this reflects broader concerns about reduced customer choice, lack of transparency, and increased costs arising from Microsoft’s ecosystem design.
The parish council expressed its views in response to a Competition and Markets Authority investigation into the fairness of Microsoft’s business software ecosystem.
It claimed Microsoft’s refusal to integrate fully with third-party products creates unnecessary additional costs for parish councils, adding:
We sought to use Microsoft Teams as a collaboration platform. However, we discovered that full functionality is effectively dependent on purchasing Microsoft email accounts.
This represents a significant and unplanned expense for a small parish council operating under financial constraints.
Clerk Robert Bareham urged the Competition and Markets Authority, which is the public body responsible for competition and consumer protection laws, to “consider the impact of these practices on parish councils and other small public sector organisations”.
When it opened the consultation in May, the Competition and Markets Authority said:
The Competition and Markets Authority has heard that UK customers may not always be able to effectively combine software from Microsoft with that of other providers, limiting their ability to get access to the best products at the most competitive prices. The Competition and Markets Authority’s investigation will examine whether Microsoft has strategic market status in business software and consider whether it can use that position to limit customer choice.
Microsoft did not respond to our request for comment.
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