LONDON, Feb 9: There is a great potential for Pakistani entrepreneurs with the right kind of capacities, skills and discipline in the UK’s outsourcing market as hundreds of exportable clerical jobs are opening in the UK’s National Health Services (NHS) alone for outsourcing.

At present about two thirds of NHS accounting and finance functions are being planned to be outsourced, with about 60 per cent of this work going to India.

In 2004 the NHS set up a joint venture with Xansa, the leading outsourcing company, which has since grown rapidly. So far 142 NHS trusts are signed up; £15 billion in payments are being processed per year, achieving savings of 32 per cent, according to the joint venture, NHS Shared Business Services (SBS).

Interested Pakistani entrepreneurs looking for outsourcing work in the UK could contact Xansa if they have competing but better quality facilities than the Indians have.

As well as cutting its back-office costs, the NHS benefits by getting half the profits of the venture. Over the next decade £224 million is planned to be diverted to frontline services.

A DoH spokeswoman said: “More trusts signing up to use the NHS Shared Business Services is good news for the NHS. Streamlining NHS back-office functions reduce bureaucracy and generates substantial savings for reinvestment in frontline services.”

Invoices, expenses claims, payroll details and other financial data is sent by participating trusts to the SBS centres in Leeds, Bristol, Southampton and Portsmouth. The documents are scanned and sent electronically to India, where staff processes them.

Other government departments, encouraged by the prime minister, are considering following suit to exploit India’s cheap, highly skilled, English-speaking labour force.

No NHS trust is compelled to outsource its clerical work and some have refused to do so. Those that do share in any returns produced by the joint venture.

The NHS deal with Xansa is being seen as a test case for the rest of central government. SBS, which already processes 4.4 billion invoices a year, has a centre in Pune, outside Bombay. There are 500 employees in Britain and 250 in India, but the number in India will rise as workload increases.

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 that off shoring 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?

The staffs who risk losing their jobs as a result of the outsourcing policy are among the lowest-paid in the NHS. A finance assistant earns between £11,782 and £12,853 a year. The next grade up, which would cover some of their staff involved, earns between £12,177 and £15,107.

Salaries are considerably lower in Pune, where SBS employs its Indian staff comparable grades there would earn between 30 and 40 per cent less.