NHS IT projects could be in line for cutbacks following this week's pre-budget report. Chancellor Alistair Darling told The Andrew Marr Show yesterday that the report, due to be published on Wednesday, will provide guidance on which areas of public spending were likely to be cut.

More details of the G-Cloud - the proposed government-wide cloud computing platform - have emerged. The G-Cloud will feature the hinted-at app store, according to Martin Bellamy, the director of the office of chief information officer at the Cabinet Office, and will make use of both public and private datacentres.

The opening of a National Skills Academy for IT in the UK has moved a step closer, after the government announced it has approved the business plan submitted by sector skills body e-skills UK. In October 2008 the government gave the green light to a tech academy on account of IT's "critical" role in growing the national economy, and because of strong and growing demand for tech workers - more than 140,000 new IT recruits are required by the industry every year, according to e-skills UK.

The IT gender pay gap is getting worse, according to results from the 2009 silicon.com Skills Survey. More than a third (35 per cent) of female IT workers responding to this year's survey said they were on the bottom rung of the tech pay ladder, earning less than £25k, compared to just under a third of women (32 per cent) last year. And only 14 per cent of male IT workers are in the lowest pay bracket this year, down from 20 per cent in 2008.

Picture the scene: the year is 2016 and ID cards have been embraced by the British public, with most UK citizens now carrying their very own card. This increasingly unlikely scenario is how the government initially envisaged the ID card scheme would turn out way back in 2006.

Encouraging businesses to go green is good but the government must better incorporate outsourcing in its carbon control scheme, says the NOA's Mark Kobayashi-Hillary Much is being said about the UK government's upcoming Carbon Reduction Commitment (CRC) scheme but it remains unclear how much of this talk is translating into action and what impact the scheme will have on the outsourcing and offshoring industries.

Shared services delivered through the cloud will help the public sector shave billions from its annual IT spend, according to a leaked Whitehall report. The leaked draft document, Government ICT Strategy: New world, new challenges, new opportunities, sets out priorities for public sector IT chiefs through to 2020.

Working out your budgets and trying to figure out the tech priorities for your HR department in 2010? Nick Heath has a few suggestions for HR directors as to where to invest that cash on technology to get the most benefits for your team and the rest of the business. Consider standardising your systemsTake a look at what you do in the HR department and the chances are a number of companies are doing exactly the same thing: processes like payroll and benefits administration or training and recruitment will need to be carried out at any large organisation. As a result, adopting standardised systems for common processes is worth considering for enterprises that are relying on expensive, bespoke IT systems.

The National Identity Register - the database behind the ID card scheme - contains more than 500 names after a month of operation. The database went live on 20 October, and the identity commissioner Sir Joseph Pilling said it contains 538 names as of 19 November.

Outsourcing deals typically promise to deliver cost savings and increased efficiency - but all too often the promises fail to match the reality. At the National Outsourcing Association's Sourcing Summit last week, two heads of IT shared their experiences of how to get the best out of outsourcing agreements and make sure they're delivering long-term value.

The Metropolitan Police's Central e-Crime Unit arrested two people earlier this month for the suspected criminal distribution of the Zeus Trojan. A spokesman for the Met Police told silicon.com sister site ZDNet UK on Thursday that the man and woman were arrested on 3 November, but have been released on bail and not yet been formally charged.

Money transfer, location-based services and mobile health monitoring are likely to be among the most widespread mobile applications within the next three years. The increasing adoption of smartphones and the success of app stores has ignited the mobile apps market (follow the link for silicon.com's run down of the top iPhone apps for business).

The Dubai Municipality is in the process of constructing the Middle East's first fully automated, driverless metro system. Once completed the Metro will have 47 stations served by 87 trains, and is eventually projected to carry some 355 million passengers per year. Not content with a full fleet of robotic trains, the Dubai metro will also boast blanket wi-fi connectivity on all trains and stations.

The controversial ID project has hit another delay, with the government missing its own deadline to get the cards into the hands of Manchester residents. The Home Office announced today that people living or working in Manchester will now be able to enrol their details for an ID card from 30 November, with the first cards issued around 10 days after enrolment.

As the hype around microblogging builds, should your business join the tweet-fest or keep schtum? silicon.com's Natasha Lomas deconstructs this Digital Dilemma. So you've heard about Twitter. You might even know what the word 'tweet' means. Well done. Your finger is well and truly riding the social media pulse. But here's the rub: should your business join the tweet-fest and set up shop on Twitter? Is microblogging the new marketing?

With the government hoping to offset or reduce all the CO2 emissions produced by its fleet of half a million computers by 2012, IT is under more pressure than ever to go green. As a result, the public sector has "stopped eating pies and put ourselves on a diet" when it comes to carbon, according to the government's green IT champion, Chris Chant.

Organisations that lose individuals' data could face a fine of up to £500,000 under proposals being considered by the government. From next year, the privacy watchdog the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) will be able to fine companies that recklessly or maliciously breach the Data Protection Act (DPA). The Ministry of Justice yesterday launched a public consultation on the maximum amount such fines can run to - a figure it proposes should be set at £500,000.

Businesses that want to use green IT to save big bucks need to look beyond the server room and start getting creative with their business software. Companies should stop thinking that green IT ends with ramping up server utilisation or replacing desktop PCs with thin clients, Warren Wilson, senior analyst with Ovum, told the Green IT Expo in London this week.

The UK government has confirmed it intends to push ahead with plans to monitor the UK's communications. Under the Interception Modernisation Programme (IMP), the government wants communications service providers to store details of all web communications, including emails and IMs conversations.

Local council IT departments' tendency to outsource problematic tech functions means their outsourcing projects are rarely successful, according to a new report. The report, from consultants Deloitte, reveals that local councils need to change their overall approach to IT rather than hoping outsourcers can step in and solve all their tech problems.

The work of the Bletchley Park codebreakers is credited with shortening the Second World War by two years. But for three decades, those who worked on decrypting Nazi communications could tell no one what they had done. Such was the secrecy in which the codebreakers operated many did not even realise the true importance of their work until Bletchley's wartime activities were made public in 1974.

The European Parliament and Council of Telecoms Ministers have reached a compromise over the rights of internet users continent-wide, setting Europe on course for a major overhaul of telecoms regulations. The Telecoms Reform package, which consists of a set of new laws tackling subjects ranging from data breach notifications to faster number porting, will become law in every EU country by May 2011, it was agreed on Wednesday night.

Local authorities must cut down on using covert-surveillance techniques to investigate petty offences, the government has said. Ripa (the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act) granted public authorities the power to use surveillance to investigate crimes such as terrorism - but councils have attracted criticism for using them to detect petty offences such as dog-fouling.

While the debate over bankers' bonuses may still be generating headlines, it seems the financial services industry has found one way to cut back - slash IT budgets. Financial services firms' IT budgets fell by 8.3 per cent between 2008 and 2009, meaning the banks have cut their budgets more than other industries, and saw spending fall by 6.8 per cent year-on-year.

The UK will never create a software giant to rival the likes of Microsoft, Google or Oracle. That's the sobering conclusion of the silicon.com CIO Jury which voted 10 to two against, when asked whether the UK could create a global software business to rival the technology industry's most powerful companies.