Sellafield Limited has awarded a £33 million contract to SAP for the 'Core HR SaaS Licensing to include Recruitment Module' as the first step in its ERP migration project. This contract is part of a larger plan to transition from the legacy SAP BS7 system to the currently supported SAP S/4HANA system.
Asgard will help it realise the ambitions of the government's 2025 Strategic defence review, which promised to 'deliver a tenfold increase in lethality over the next 10 years' via a combination of enhanced 'firepower, surveillance technology, autonomy, digital connectivity and data'.
I was alarmed and made a point to the board that the review refers to Microsoft Copilot as being used to evaluate the returns. I don't think you can rely on artificial intelligence to do that. It's just wrong.
A briefing by the health justice charity Medact said the highly interoperable nature of Palantir's software could enable data-driven state abuses of power, including US-style ICE raids. The report, released on Thursday and backed by doctors, lawyers, patients and human rights groups from the No Palantir in the NHS campaign and sent to hospital trusts and integrated care boards nationwide, was shared with the Guardian and BMJ.
The module is part of the National Aviation Passenger Allocation Model, or NAPAM, which forecasts passenger airport choices. It consists of about 10,000 lines of code written in a Microsoft .NET C++ environment with Excel used for data input and output. It carries out iterative calculations until these hit a set value such as an airport's maximum number of passengers.
Understanding the difference in purpose Unlike private businesses, which exist to make a profit, public institutions are designed to create impact - especially social and economic outcomes that benefit everyone, not just paying customers. A public agency doesn't measure its success in revenue or margins, but in how much it improves lives, builds equity and maintains public trust. This doesn't mean budgets and spending don't matter - they absolutely do - but money is not the goal. It's the tool.
IT and tech suppliers to the UK public sector with the fastest-growing revenues increased incomes by an average of 1.8x and £3.8m each between 2023 and 2025. The fastest-growing companies were in the defence sector, with one company - SRC UK - growing revenue by 16x across the period. Those are some of the findings of public sector IT research specialist Tussell in its annual Tech200 report on the fastest-growing tech suppliers to the public sector.
The UK's tax collector is budgeting to spend more than £2 billion on new tech deals in the next couple of years, including a contract set for AWS and another for Capgemini to be awarded without competition. According to a spreadsheet of the procurement pipeline for this year and next, His Majesty's Revenue & Customs (HMRC) is starting with a data warehouse transformation program with a contract value estimated at £410 million.
The Treasury Department has moved to cancel all contracts with Booz Allen Hamilton, two years after a former company employee pled guilty to leaking President Trump's confidential tax information without authorization. Treasury currently has 31 contracts with Booz Allen that average roughly $4.8 million in annual spending and have totaled $21 million in obligations. In a statement issued Monday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent cited inadequate data protection safeguards as driving the decision and specifically the disclosure of sensitive taxpayer information accessed through IRS contracts.
It concludes that there will be one additional death for every 69 patients who experience more than a four-hour wait in ED after the decision to admit has been made. This is consistent with previous studies. It's appalling in and of itself. Crucially, the study also demonstrated that for every four hours a person waited for a bed, their length of stay, once they got into that bed, increased by 8.6 hours.
"If an organisation has performed so badly for its customers that it has become a national scandal and warranted its own TV drama, surely it's time the government spent its money elsewhere," Megawarne said.
This population [of contractors] had been unusually large to enable the provision of information and documents to the public inquiry, handle thousands of remediation claims and the development of systems to move off Horizon,
This is a new unit within the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT), led by Tristan Thomas, formerly of Monzo, and Greg Jackson, CEO of Octopus Energy. It aims to bring together the best civil service operators alongside leading private sector disruptors and transformation specialists. The plan is to use CustomerFirst expertise to rewire government services, making use of AI and best practices from the private sector.
These people are exactly who can help us create change across the public sector giving us the hard truths on our approach to AI and advising where we need to prioritise our investment to support real efficiencies, said Murray, who added that their advice will feed into efficiency processes ahead of the next spending review.
The accounting watchdog said that, although there had been no new financial issues, it "disclaimed" the college's latest 2024-25 accounts because of the continuing "fallout" from financial reporting problems that resulted from a problematic IT project. "We were not able to provide a complete opinion on the opening position or in-year transactions for 2024-25, both of which are heavily derived from the closing position of the prior year," it added.
The monthly purchasing managers' index showed employment numbers fell more sharply in January compared with December, continuing a trend that started in October 2024. The PMI survey, which is considered to be one of the most reliable indicators of how a sector is performing, said this was the longest period of job shedding in the UK services sector in 16 years, with firms also choosing not to replace voluntary leavers.
He said performance indicators for senior officials would be set by ministers and those civil servants not meeting expectations would be shown the door. Instead of the sideways shimmy to another team or department if you fail to perform, I'm afraid you will be sacked, he said, adding that the doers, not the talkers would be in line for promotion.
It is the view of the BMA that doctors working in the NHS can no longer provide the tacit endorsement that using a product implies and must immediately take steps to explore refusing any non-direct care usage of Palantir's Federated Data Platform, with a view to moving away from the platform entirely in time, when a suitable alternative can be put in place.