City business races the Games for power

Power demand in the UK's finance centre already outstrips supply, but the Olympics will get priority in the energy infrastructure

• Pete Warren
• The Guardian,
• Thursday May 29 2008  

When the UK won its bid for the 2012 Olympic Games, Tony Blair was jubilant - but he probably little thought that he was shackling the City of London, the UK's top money earner, by denying it access to the national grid.

How? Put simply, demand for the cabling to provide power for the computer centres the industry relies upon has outstripped supply. The City has been told there can be no more computer centres until after the Games.

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Bill Kerridge is a North Shields publican who runs an award-winning pub in the Tyneside Town and whose daughter is a talented gymnast. Normally, Kerridge would be happy for the readers of a national newspaper to know those details, only he is not because along with a wealth of other information relating to his family, it was recovered from a computer hard drive bought off the internet via eBay that the Kerridges knew nothing about.

Published Guardian Thursday August 10th, 2006

"Ensuring data is completely destroyed"

Erasing data from a computer is not as simple as the manufacturers would have you believe. Just deleting it or reformatting the hard drive does not remove the data, and the secure removal of data about individuals by companies is now a legal requirement.