Tesco Jobs to Go East

The transfer of work to India reached the retail sector today as Tesco, Britain's leading supermarket, announced it was moving 420 jobs to Bangalore.

The jobs, in the area of business support, will go from offices in Cardiff, Dundee and Welwyn Garden City. The supermarket giant said its UK employees would be offered new jobs within Tesco if they were willing to be flexible.

"Everybody will be offered an alternative role at Tesco. Last year we had 350 roles that were moved, and 70% of the staff that were affected took up alternative positions at Tesco," the company said.

By moving jobs to India, Tesco is following in the footsteps of financial services and telecommunications giants such as HSBC and BT, which have been drawn by the pool of English-speaking, skilled and cheap labour available in India.

Now that Tesco has decided to adopt the same tactic, other companies in the retail sector - a growth area for jobs in the UK - may well follow the company's lead.

Even the public sector is jumping on the outsourcing bandwagon. The government is considering shipping blood and urine samples from NHS patients to India for clinical tests, in order to cut costs.

Indian laboratory technicians can be hired for as little as £4,000 a year; the savings would more than make up for the cost of flying samples across the world. Test results could be emailed back to UK hospitals. Private sector hospitals are already conducting trials of the service, which could reduce costs by as much as one-third.

Babcock, the engineering conglomerate, is to cut 290 jobs at its dockyard in Fife, Scotland, as part of a drive to cut costs. Babcock, which is transforming itself into a support services firm, said restructuring its Rosyth dockyard had helped it to win contracts to refit four British Navy warships and secure work on the new Terminal 5, to be built at Heathrow airport. The cuts will reduce the Rosyth workforce to just more than 1,500 people.