Facebook unveils London tech hub for UK engineers

Chancellor George Osborne also attended the launch and said he hoped other firms would follow Facebook and set up shop in the capital, as the Government strives to establish the UK as a world technology leader.

"We are being quite determined in our effort to bring over the biggest technology companies...by ensuring you can find in this city and country the type of talented people they need to be your engineers, sales force and the like," he said.

As an example of the work the Government is doing to encourage this, Osborne flagged its decision to overhaul the school ICT curriculum and the incentives on offer to people to retrain as computer science teachers.

"There is a huge and fast growing demand for the type of [tech] skills you need...so instead of pupils just learning how to operate Excel and Powerpoint, they're also being taught how to write code and build apps," said Osborne.

"We're also hiring more teachers to teach these kinds of programming skills...[so]if you're a computer science graduate that becomes a teacher you will get a government bursary of 9,000 to encourage you to do that."

Caroline Donnelly is the news and analysis editor of IT Pro and its sister site Cloud Pro, and covers general news, as well as the storage, security, public sector, cloud and Microsoft beats. Caroline has been a member of the IT Pro/Cloud Pro team since March 2012, and has previously worked as a reporter at several B2B publications, including UK channel magazine CRN, and as features writer for local weekly newspaper, The Slough and Windsor Observer. She studied Medical Biochemistry at the University of Leicester and completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Magazine Journalism at PMA Training in 2006.