Caroline Donnelly

1 week ago | computerweekly.com | Caroline Donnelly

Delays and distractions Following the November 2019 release of the updated CEST tool, HMRC provided month-by-month usage data about the tool on a Gov.uk portal, but that stopped in September 2021. Anyone wanting sight of those figures after that date could ask HMRC for them via the FOI scheme, which is a course of action ContractorCalculator’s Chaplin has previously followed.

2 weeks ago | computerweekly.com | Caroline Donnelly

Chancellor Rachel Reeves has committed up to £750m in funding to create the UK’s most powerful supercomputer at the University of Edinburgh, ten months after the government pulled the plug on a similar project backed by the previous administration. Funding for the project is set to be confirmed by Reeves during the Spending Review later today, where she is expected to make a series of funding commitments to secure economic growth across the nation.

2 weeks ago | computerweekly.com | Caroline Donnelly

Microsoft has until 25 July 2025 to respond to a £2bn legal claim, filed on behalf of thousands of UK businesses that were allegedly overcharged for running its Windows server software in its competitors’ cloud environments. The Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) set the deadline while confirming that it has ordered a court hearing to take place on 11 December 2025 to can decide if a collective proceedings order (CPO) for the matter should be granted.

2 weeks ago | computerweekly.com | Caroline Donnelly

Barclays has signed an agreement with public cloud giant Microsoft that will see the latter’s generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) tool Copilot rolled out to 100,000 of the bank’s employees globally. The banking giant plans to integrate Microsoft 365 Copilot into its in-house employee productivity tool to create a single AI agent that will provide staff with one-stop-shop access to its broad ecosystem of digital services.

2 weeks ago | computerweekly.com | Caroline Donnelly

Progressing the devolution Several months after the whitepaper’s publication, the government announced in early February 2025 that 19 councils had joined its Devolution Priority Programme to create strategic authorities spanning six areas. These areas include Cumbria, Cheshire and Warrington, Greater Essex, Hampshire and Solent, Norfolk and Suffolk, as well as Sussex and Brighton. This means all six of these areas are on course to become mayor-led strategic authorities by May 2026.