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The government yesterday announced its proposed policy to store all texts, browsing sessions and emails in Britain in order to cut down on national crime.

In order to carry out its plan, businesses will be required to help the Home Office after it admitted that small and medium-sized businesses, along with other major organisations, would be crucial as IT support to store and handle "a billion incidents of data exchange a day".

The government initiative, which is part of an EU directive, aims to tackle and prevent crimes that are increasing in incident numbers online, notably child exploitation.

Information would then be made available to such institutions as Ofsted and the Post Office as well as health authorities and local councils, alongside European authorities due to the directive.

The Home Office said: "Implementing the EC directive will enable UK law enforcement to benefit fully from historical communications data in increasingly complex investigations and will enhance our national security."

American newspaper the Washington Post this week revealed that US IPs were monitored by service providers without explicit consent to target advertisements at consumers.

According to a recent survey by Connect, the two biggest IT headaches for businesses were 'everyday hassles with IT' (37 per cent) and 'security concerns' (32 per cent) In a recent survey of SMEs for Connect, the two most important benefits of outsourcing were 'guaranteed response times' and 'allowing in-house IT staff to concentrate on more strategic issues'