More and more companies that have outsourced their IT and customer services to foreign locations are bringing their business back to Britain.

Increasingly, evidence suggests that customers are sceptical about the quality of service provided by outsourced service providers from overseas, and that the cost savings anticipated take longer to achieve than originally thought.

"We've seen banks and life assurers start to do it. At the time [of large-scale offshoring] purveyors said they could save 40 per cent on costs by going offshore. We have research that says it takes three years to get to that level," Martyn Hart, chairman of the National Outsourcing Association (NOA), told the Guardian.

Lloyds TSB and National Rail Enquiries have both recently increased their UK outsourcing and reduced their overseas service provision correspondingly.

That trend seems to be taking off, as businesses realise that many service users want a local presence.

"We are constantly looking at the mix of work we have offshore and onshore," a spokesperson for Norwich Union told the newspaper.


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