Budget Day 2014Chancellor of the Exchequer George Osborne presented what he described as a Budget for "the makers the doers and the savers" - and let's not forget the bingo players - in today's economy statement to Parliament. There was very little news for the tech world, with one notable exception: the announcement of the Alan Turing …

Australia's opposition parties this week released their plan for broadband infrastructure. Many people have taken to the document with an eye to the Coalition's alleged $AUD90 billion-plus figure for the cost of the current National Broadband Network, but few have asked about the accuracy of the coalition plan's assumptions. …

Last Tuesday, Australia's coalition announced its alternative national broadband network (NBN) plan, offering fibre to the node as the dominant mode of delivery. The plan appears comprehensive, but like any such document, it doesn't answer every conceivable question. With an election fewer than six months away, El Reg's …

Labour's deputy leader Harriet Harman has slammed Google's extraordinary influence over the UK's ruling Conservative-Liberal Democrat coalition government. The Shadow Deputy Prime Minister said "there are three parties in the Coalition: the Tories, the Lib Dems, and Google". It's the strongest attack yet on the Google-Tory …

The coalition's election pledge to cap IT contracts at £100m will become official policy from next month. A procurement policy notice released by the Cabinet Office sets 1 April as the deadline when the cap will come into force for central government departments, their agencies and non-departmental public bodies. The £100m …

Education supplier RM - faced with no uplift in market conditions on the horizon - is laying off staff, and flogging or shuttering some of its loss-making subsidiaries. The move plunged its share price by nearly a quarter. The LSE-listed firm today revealed it will axe more than one-fifth of the workforce as it restructures …

The Coalition government has released the names of all its special advisers who are paid more than £58,200. David Cameron has two men on salaries just under the ceiling for the posts. Craig Oliver and Andrew Cooper each trouser £140,000 a year and another adviser, Edward Llewellyn, gets £125,000. Seventeen other Spads to the …

Chancellor George Osborne should end the right of companies to import low-value items VAT-free from the Channel Islands and do something to reduce petrol and diesel prices, says a small-biz body. Ahead of Wednesday's Budget various runners and riders are jostling for attention. The Forum of Private Business said it was time to …

The Coalition government's hope that the private sector will soak up staff laid off from the public sector took a blow today from a survey showing more than half of UK businesses would not employ people from the public sector. A survey of 500 firms by the FT and Barclays Corporate found 57 per cent said they were not …

The UK government may have abolished a shedload of quangos in recent months, but the Cabinet Office has arguably just created a shiny, new one – step forward the Public Data Corporation. Data and government bodies will be squished into one organisation to make yet-to-be-revealed datasets available to the public, Cabinet Office …

After months of phoney war, George Osborne has detailed the coalition's battle plan to beat Britain's £109bn deficit, confirming hundreds of thousands of casualties across the public sector. The Chancellor also announced sweeping reforms to the welfare system, saying "fairness" is the government's guiding principle. Osborne …

The coalition government has scrapped the promised review on the tax paid on fibre-optic connections, leaving BT and Virgin with enough tax advantages to maintain their duopoly. Confirmation that the review is to be dropped comes from Ed Vaizey, Minister for Communication, Culture and the Creative Industries, which is where …

The coalition has today announced plans to strip workers of new rights to request time off to improve their skills. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said the move will help reduce the regulatory burden on employers. If implemented, 11 million workers will lose statutory protection for their training requests …

The government's first attempt at crowd-sourcing policy has ended with every Whitehall department rejecting the public's ideas, or claiming them as endorsement of existing plans. More than 9,500 comments were published on the Programme for Government website, which was launched on 20 May, days after the formation of the …

Cable and Wireless shares tumbled more than 20 per cent this morning after it warned investors it would miss profit targets because of cuts in the public sector. "Following the new government's emergency budget in late June, non-contracted spending in the UK public sector has slowed very significantly," it said in an …

The new government plans to ban the controversial practice in schools of taking children's fingerprints without their permission. The decision is likely to mean a change in the law. According to the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO), as it stands the Data Protection Act allows schools to take pupil fingerprints without …

The world's media continues to follow the long-running piracy problems in the Gulf of Aden, with interest stimulated by last week's fatal shootings by Royal Marines off the Yemeni coast and the reported sinking of a buccaneer "mothership" by the Indian Navy yesterday evening. Meanwhile, other seaborne raiders in the region …

CommentFollowing a recent spate of pirate attacks* off the Horn of Africa, reportedly Her Majesty's Royal Navy has been powerless to act following official concern over possible violations of the buccaneers' human rights - and worries that they might seek asylum in the UK after being captured. The shipping paper Lloyds List first …