A research company has put forward some radical proposals for how governments can reduce IT spending and still facilitate a recovery.

Gartner claimed that governments could use resources more effectively by piloting public cloud computing systems, which would also create job roles for IT contractors.

The firm's vice-president Andrea Di Maio believes that many governments have gone through cost-cutting cycles since the credit crunch, with European authorities set to follow the UK's lead in reducing public expenditure.

In addition, more remote workers, such as IT contractors, could be used to supplement the workforce in the face of pay and recruitment freezes, Gartner claims.

"We expect that governments in Europe are likely to follow the UK's spending cuts and gradually move toward increasingly considering consolidation, outsourcing, global delivery models and industrialised services," said Mr Di Maio.

Dr Paul Sisson, a research fellow at the Institute for Employment Studies, recently warned that the UK's private sector is not currently in a position to absorb the proposed public sector job cuts.