UK Government Possibly Outsourcing to India.

[Big Orange]

Here is another straw Gordon Brown has put on the camel's back and it is part of our piblic education being sold down the river; British jobs for who now?

July 29, 2009
Union fury as civil service outsources jobs to India
Jill Sherman, Whitehall Editor

More than 100 jobs at the British Council are to be outsourced to India as part of a massive cost-cutting drive to save the taxpayer money, The Times has learnt.

The decision to recruit local Indian workers to fill finance and IT posts has infuriated unions, who fear that this could be the blueprint for Whitehall.

It is believed to be the first time that the Civil Service or a quango has directly exported jobs to save costs. The Foreign and Commonwealth Office, which funds the British Council, is exploring similar options. A spokesman said that administrative jobs could be carried out by local staff in regional hubs overseas.

The Public and Commercial Services Union (PCS), which represents civil servants, said that the British Council decision went against Gordon Brown’s stated principle of “British jobs for British people” and could not be justified during a recession.

The council, which promotes British culture and language abroad, said that 500 of its 1,300 British workers would have to go in the next 18 months to save £45 million. More than a fifth of these posts are to be filled in India and the body plans to bring some of the Indian recruits over to “shadow” finance staff in Manchester.

The proposals coincide with the Treasury’s review of quangos, which cost the taxpayer £64 billion a year. The Treasury wants to cut or merge as many as possible. David Cameron has pledged a “bonfire of quangos” if the Tories win the next general election.

Martin Davidson, the British Council’s chief executive, said that 280 of the 500 back-office staff to be cut were permanent and the remainder were agency, part-time or contract staff. The body received £205 million from the taxpayer this year. He said that its budget had already been cut by 10 per cent and that he had drawn up a further £25 million in efficiency savings. It makes about £450 million from its commercial programme including language and teaching courses.

The Times has seen documents showing that the quango is considering plans to cut 80 per cent or 800 of its permanent staff to just 240 within five years. However, Mr Davidson said that this had not been discussed by the council executive or trustees and that there were no proposals to implement cutbacks beyond next year. He said that finance staff had looked at a series of scenarios involving heavier job losses but that these were “not part of discussions in any sense whatsover.” He acknowledged that such cuts would involve “catastrophic” changes to the programmes that the council wanted to deliver.

The PCS is furious that jobs are to go to India. A spokesman, Dave Cliff, said: “We think it is an absolute disgrace. The British Council is an educational and cultural organisation to support British culture, but a big part of this organisation is now going to be based abroad.”The union is considering lodging a tribunal application because management failed to consult them over the job changes. It claims that staff at the British Council are civil servants since they belong to the Civil Service Pension scheme. Mr Davidson said that technically they were public servants.

A spokesman for the Cabinet Office said that it was unlikely that Whitehall departments would send jobs offshore, partly for security reasons.

A spokesman for the Foreign Office said: “The FCO is working actively to deliver cost savings and to ensure that as much of our resource as possible is focused on frontline activity delivering for the UK. We therefore fully understand the British Council’s efforts in that direction.”

Mr Davidson said that he hoped that most of the cuts could be made through voluntary redundancies. “Our spending power overseas has been hit by the fall in the value of sterling in the last year,” he said. “To ensure that we continue to spend as much of the money we receive from the taxpayer as possible on our programmes abroad, we are cutting our running costs by creating leaner, lighter and more effective administrative and back-office functions.”

Final decisions about which jobs will go to India will be taken in the next few weeks, but they are expected to include 58 finance posts, up to 40 IT posts and 15 posts for a new centre of excellence. About half the jobs to be cut will be in education and teaching. Some of these areas will have to be contracted out to voluntary groups or local authorities.

Times Online

[[R_H]]

Why not just cut their pay or reduce their hours, instead of firing them? How well do government employees get paid in Britain?

[Starglider]

Why not just cut their pay or reduce their hours, instead of firing them? How well do government employees get paid in Britain?

Low-level government employees get salaries that are about 80% of the private sector equivalent (on average, it varies between departments and areas). This is supposed to be compensated for by stellar job security, i.e. it is almost impossible to be fired (you can be completely incompetent, worthless and even regularly come into work drunk and it is still very difficult to fire you). This is a major reason why government bureaucracy workers are stereotypically unmotivated and incompetent. Mid to high level workers get paid quite well, though the salary scale doesn't go as high as it does in large companies.

A good half of the civil service and local government workers I've know fully deserve to lose their jobs to overseas competition, so I would guess that about half of these ones do as well. Regardless, I oppose sending government functions overseas as a general principle.

[Simon_Jester]

I have this weird vision of the process continuing for a hundred years or so until Britain is, for all practical purposes, administered from India as part of the "Indian Empire..."

No, I don't expect it to happen; I just think it would be funny as hell.
________

On a side note, what exactly is a "quango?"

[[R_H]]

Why not just cut their pay or reduce their hours, instead of firing them? How well do government employees get paid in Britain?

Low-level government employees get salaries that are about 80% of the private sector equivalent (on average, it varies between departments and areas). This is supposed to be compensated for by stellar job security, i.e. it is almost impossible to be fired (you can be completely incompetent, worthless and even regularly come into work drunk and it is still very difficult to fire you). This is a major reason why government bureaucracy workers are stereotypically unmotivated and incompetent. Mid to high level workers get paid quite well, though the salary scale doesn't go as high as it does in large companies.

A good half of the civil service and local government workers I've know fully deserve to lose their jobs to overseas competition, so I would guess that about half of these ones do as well. Regardless, I oppose sending government functions overseas as a general principle.

I don't know how accurate this site, Civil Service Pay is, but...

First, the most senior civil servants are paid less than half of their private sector equivalents. But pay rates improve, relative to the private sector, the further one descends through the ranks, to the extent that the very lowest grades are paid relatively well. The following chart, taken from the 2009 Senior Salaries Review Body Report, summarises the position rather well.

and

This relative favouring of lower paid staff has arisen because there has been an understandable tendency, over many years, for unions, senior managers and Ministers to look after those on the lowest pay. But it cannot be stressed too strongly that such pay nevertheless does remain low in absolute terms, as do the pensions that result from such low paid employment. According to the main civil service union, a quarter of civil servants earned less than £15,430 a year in 2006.

Amusingly, the site states: "Fourth, there is these days no more job security in the civil service than outside it..."

[Big Orange]

I don't think Britain has been as severly financially smashed as Ireland and Iceland, our unemployment is not quite as severe as Spain's, and we have a less politically volatile difference between the rich and middle class/poor in comparison to America, however this excessive outsourcing of customer interface and IT to India has helped lead Britain's service economy down into a cul-de-sac. Instead of properly fixing the underlining problems and expenses of administration inhouse, the companies and government are just dumping their office problems on the otherside of the world, throwing the baby out with the bathwater and letting other long term problems crop up instead (with declining administration quality, many IT projects falling apart, unreliable call centres, and a more deskilled UK workforce). I broadly agree with Starglider's sentiments; the British public sector does reward mediocrity, however the British private sector severly punishes loyalty, with no correct balance in both sectors, which why the whole edifice has come crashing down.

[Androsphinx]

The British Council isn't a government department. It's what we call a Quango - Quasi-Autonomous Non-Government Organisation. They're going to lose a bunch of their funding (much of which comes from the government), and have decided to make administrative cuts rather than affecting services directly. It's obviously not an ideal situation, but it's hard to criticise the decision.

[Big Orange]

There were rumours that the UK government were going to do something stupid and offload tax processing in India!

No plans to outsource tax processing work to India, says UK
6 Aug 2009, 1730 hrs IST, PTI

LONDON: Britain has dismissed reports that it is contemplating outsourcing sensitive tax processing work to India, saying it does not have any such plans right now.

These services are not permitted to be delivered from outside, said a spokesman for Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs (HMRC).

"We currently have no plans to change this. HMRC is constantly looking at how it can provide better value for money to the taxpayer. Project Quantum is specifically focussed on value for money in the IT field," he said.

The spokesman was refuting a report in 'Computer Weekly' that Britain's Finance Ministry is considering proposals to contract out sensitive tax processing work to India.

The report had claimed that "HMRC ministry and its main IT contractors Capgemini Fujitsu are looking at the potential of outsourcing some tax processing to India."

The Economic Times

[Spyder]

Interesting that the UK doesn't have legal barriers to this. Our government departments will only allow data to be handled within New Zealand. Australia has the same thing, the company I work for has a contract with the Australian DoD but our NZ offices and datacentres can't touch it.

[Bedlam]

The data protection act does suposedly not allow information to be sent out of the EU but it seems that there are wayes to circumvent it.

I think I remember something about companies putting the offshoring details in small print on contacts so that by signing you were waving that right. I think their also might be some loophole about information being sent to somewhere that has the same level of information security as the UK.