Britain, NHS, Accounting, Outsourcing, India

Britain's NHS ups outsourcing to India

Britain's National Health Service (NHS) says it will export hundreds of clerical jobs, including accounting functions, to India.

"I recently gave permission to outsource 60 percent of the work to India," Deputy Finance Director Peter Coates told a conference in Mumbai. "It could go higher, but the constraint is that we cannot move jobs to India at the expense of shedding jobs in the (United Kingdom). Politics will be an important factor."

The health service has been outsourcing work since 2004, at a cost savings of about 32 percent a year, when it set up a joint venture with Xansa, a leading outsourcing company.

Other government departments, encouraged by the Prime Minister, are considering following suit to exploit India’s cheap, highly skilled, English-speaking labor force in a move that has angered trade unions.

“I firmly believe this model will be used elsewhere in the Government to deliver services,” Mr Coates said. “The OGC [Office of Government Commerce, a procurement unit of the Treasury] is looking very closely at applying it.”

No NHS trust is compelled to outsource its crerical work and some have refused to do so.

Xansa’s original NHS contract stipulated that the venture could only source up to 37 per cent of its work from India. The Government’s change of heart in December reflects the growing pressure to cut NHS costs. Alistair Cox, chief executive of Xansa, admitted yesterday that offshoring was an emotive subject. “Delivering public service work from outside the UK is sensitive,” he said. “But we are talking about sending people to have operations in France so what’s wrong with processing someone’s invoice in India?

“People will be displaced by globalization – we have to get our heads around that.”