Official figures on sales, released last week, show that purchases in the local authority category, which includes councils, housing associations and other local public bodies, rose from £1.45m to £1.49m over the month.

The rise compares to a drop of 20.9% from October to November. The December figures also exclude a set of 16 purchases by the Foreign and Commonwealth Office. This is the second month that sales from the central government department appear to have been mistakenly added to the local government category.

Local government made 178 individual purchases during the month, up from 173 the previous month.

More than a quarter of purchases by value in the category came from Bristol City Council, which spent £399,563 on 42 purchases.

The largest purchase by local government in December was by Transport for London, the London mayor’s transport body. It spent 85,000 on specialist cloud services to change management firm Programme Planning Professionals, otherwise known as PCubed.

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Cumulative sales through G-Cloud, including by other parts of government, topped £1bn in December, the government said.

The figures showed that over half (£521m) of the total sales have now gone to small businesses, with nearly 90% of the 2,700 suppliers on the marketplace being businesses of this size.

The government said there was also evidence that the marketplace is helping businesses grow. It said a recent survey found 31% of suppliers had increased their headcount as direct result of being on the marketplace, with 5% increasing their turnover by £1 million or more.

At the beginning of this month, the government rolled out the first of a series of planned improvements to the framework.

Suppliers are now able to remove services from the G-Cloud they no longer provide.