Anyone reaching pension age, wanting to draw a state pension after having worked all their live. The demographic reasons for this crises is that the population growth in relation to people having children is slowing down, so the ratio of old people to young people grows in favour of the old people. So less young people are having to find the money to pay for the pensions of the old ones. The UK trade balance was £4.7 billion in deficit in November 2006 up from £4.1 billion in October 2006, as a small rise in exports (up 0.5 per cent) was outweighed by a larger rise in imports (up 2.3 per cent). Link

What can one do about it?

Very little as the end user or consumer as pensions are state regulated and it is a fiscal matter. "The State" is responsible for collecting Payee contributions and taxes and redistributes those with pension payments. The state tries to resolve part of the problem by raising the pension age to 70, when it previously was 60 - 65.

What makes it much more difficult

However the government doesn't act logically at all on this one. It should be the government's most urgent concern to devise plans to collect as many contributions as possible from working men and women within the UK as it is the UK treasury being responsible for the distribution of those contributions to entitled pensioners.

But instead of trying to attract as many tax paying workers as possible the current UK government both acting and in opposition supports the outsourcing of UK jobs to the Asian continent, mainly India in the form of call centres and typing pools.

Those employees of those Indian companies do not pay any contributions to the UK treasury for their wages earned nor do those Indian companies pay any kind of tax to the UK treasury on their profits earned.

At the same time the UK government thinks of introducing a living wage, meaning an even higher minimum wage for UK workers and even higher for Londoners. This of course has to be paid for and reflected in the prices a UK company charges for work carried out to the user.

A little example how weird it is

We (Whizz Business Solutions Ltd) recently became aware that a major London hospital, (NHS Trust) is asking for tenders to carry out all their typing externally, in the region of 1 million letters per year. Of course we expressed our interest and asked the person in charge what type of quality is required when handling medically specific correspondence, whether the correspondence contains a lot of specific medical vocabulary like the names of medicines and other specific terminology to be able to ascertain to what extend we would have to employ medically trained secretaries to type those letters. We were told that he didn't really know that but he was certain that he wanted 1 month's worth of free work. As you all know, we could not possibly find any qualified staff who would be willing to work for free nor could we find the facilities to work without any overheads for a month, so we would have to carry the cost of the free work over to the following months and raise our rates to cover the cost of the 1 month free.

Apparently the manager in charge of tenders did not really know the type of quality needed to type those letters and was more interested to get our balance sheets for the last 3 years and said we had exactly 3 working days to provide an estimate to him, failing this we were disqualified from further negotiations.

So not knowing what qualitative requirements we had to fulfil at this point we refused to continue with the negotiations. Our company would not compromise quality for quantity and it is very likely that this major London NHS trust will now out-source to India too.

The Risks

An article in this week's Sunday Mirror highlights the problems in the case of police files being handled by Indian centres, who often return the forms with wrong spellings so that the police cannot check potential offenders against their files.

The fiscal point

Regardless the government pointing out the lingering pension crises they should really try harder to get people to pay more contributions and if large chunks of work are being outsourced to India the people who would have carried out that work in the UK cannot pay the pension contributions and on top of that they have to sign on as unemployed, doubling the burden on the treasury.

I wrote to every European Parliament representative we got and got the same answer from all of them, regardless of their political background, they all defended the out-sourcing to India.

End unemployment in the UK

We are situated in one of the poorest boroughs of the United Kingdom, the London Borough of Tower Hamlets with plenty of unemployed people to choose from to put together a work force to carry out all those out-sourced typing and call centre jobs within the UK, all those persons would sign off as unemployed, pay their taxes and insurance contributions and strengthen the fiscal purse, but instead we are being told that we cannot get any support to retrain and employ UK unemployed persons as the work has to go to India instead. Vital resources are being sucked out of the UK financially and despite employed persons paying contributions into the NHS to provide health care the NHS does their best to pay considerable amounts for services to non UK countries. Ask them how much exactly they extract from the UK budget and pay to foreign economies who do not return any of those earnings neither in taxes nor contributions to the UK.

What can the people do?

Choose to deal with companies, which have UK call centres. Refuse whenever possible to deal with Indian phone operators. Do put the phone down and write to the company instead asking for a written reply.

Solutions

Our company cannot offer any quick solutions to this problem. We currently mainly only get work, which requires high levels of skill and therefore outsource Indian companies are unable to provide this work. Generally UK companies, which outsource often do not have the criteria of quality but they want cheap and quantity. As you know skills costs money. We would urge you to register for work in the hope that the situation will improve in the future and then we have a pool of workers to draw on just in case. Registration is free and we keep your details completely confidential.

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