Hundreds of computer technicians in India are to develop an IT system for the government’s universal credit welfare programme, despite promises that large data projects would remain in the UK.
The work, outsourced by the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP), is worth over half a billion pounds and will be carried out ahead of the universal credit programme’s introduction next year.
The government claims that the programme will simplify benefits by merging income-related jobseekers allowance, housing benefit, child tax credits, income support and income-related employment support allowance into a single payment. The plans have been outlined in information published on the DWP intranet by Paul MacPherson from Universal Credit Design Technology.
“I truly believe we have an offshore capability which provides world-class expertise and we are leveraging the best resources Accenture and IBM, in particular, have to offer,” said MacPherson. “We are looking to maximise the use of offshore development in the interests of both cost and time. In relation to cost, the greater the amount of development work we can do offshore, the lower the overall blended rate for the programme. Another benefit of offshore where time is concerned is that we are able to drive more design and development hours from each working day.”
However the decision is likely to anger many who believed employment minister Chris Grayling’s pledge to keep his department’s major IT projects in the UK. India remains a popular destination for services contracts, despite rising costs, as demonstrated by Lloyd’s Banking Group’s decision to move 593 IT positions to the country earlier this month. This sparked anger from the Lloyds Trade Union, which labelled the move “disgraceful”, especially since the group is 40 percent owned by the government.
Last month, the government announced that it was going to allow overseas suppliers to handle certain types of public data on its G-cloud, while the NHS and Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC) reached a £900 million compromise for the American firm to supply IT services despite its contribution to the failure of the £12.7 billion National Programme for IT.
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This was kept nicely quite. I'm sure UK citizens will be pleased that UK jobs are being exported overseas and citizens data will be useful used by the hackers and scam artist that seem to abound from India.
More to the point why don't we have the indians come here and do the work so that they pay taxes in the UK and spend their salary here, getting the rest of our eceonmy growing. It might even push house prices up and get that bit going again too!
Ironic that in preparation for the largest overhaul in the welfare system in many years, (which has been designed to 'make work pay'), jobs that could have reduced our own unemployment have been sent oversees. And as already mentioned here, any tax raised from the earnings of these jobs will not be put back into our economy. Makes you wonder whether they intend the admin of universal credit to stay oversees too. Now thats a scary thought! What a disgrace.
Maybe we could offshore the whole of the cabinet (would we notice any difference) - more money and jobs being depleted from the UK, shame on the government.