A leading British home loans company and bank has bucked the trend of transferring call centre work to India by announcing plans to create nearly 200 jobs in the United Kingdom.

The Nationwide Group, which has pledged not to switch jobs abroad to countries like India, has unveiled a major refurbishment of its centres in the cities of Swindon and Northampton, and also announced plans to open a new center in Sheffield.

Nationwide chief executive Philip Williamson said, "Call centres abroad may suit some of our competitors, but they are not the right option for Nationwide."

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"We are aware of some commentators' concerns that some countries may not have the same level of data protection for consumers in the UK," he said.

British industrial regeneration experts have welcomed the expansion news and jobs boost.

One of them, Vince Taylor, director of development body Sheffield First Partnership, said, "This is welcome news. Sheffield appears to be bucking the trend of outsourcing to lower-cost locations by producing higher levels of customer service than is being achieved through the outsourcing route, which several businesses have found has risks attached."

Sheffield Council leader Jan Wilson said, "I am very pleased to hear about these new jobs coming to Sheffield, job-creation is a key part of the city's regeneration."

Nationwide's announcement comes in the wake of new research that claims workers in British call centres answered 25 per cent more calls each hour than Indian workers and resolved 17 per cent more of these calls first time.

British call centre employees also tended to stay with their company for well over three years, compared to 11 months for Indian workers.

The report released last month by research firm ContactBabel, reveals that workers in Indian call centres are being paid less than 12 per cent of the typical salary of a UK call centre worker.

Steve Morrell, author of the report, says the difference is a 'shock,' especially as Indian staff work six hours a week longer than those in the UK.

In a survey of 300 British and Indian call centres, it was found that Indian workers answered calls more than twice as quickly as in the UK.

Morrell says that despite this finding, call centres in the UK provide better quality of service.

He said, "Indian agents are very quick to pick up the phone, but it takes them more than a minute longer to complete each call, and more than a third of customers have to call back later to get a satisfactory resolution to their inquiry. This can be extremely frustrating."

"These figures show what we all knew anyway; businesses moving their call centres to India are doing it to save their salary bill, not to improve their quality of service, regardless of what they say," he said.

The report says the average starting salary for a worker in India is only £1,500 a year, compared to £13,000 in the UK. Indian workers are quicker to answer the phone than in the UK as a result of a generous level of staffing because staff costs are so cheap, says the report.

The ContactBabel findings follow a separate report by another British call centre specialist, Mike Allen of Mitial, who told rediff.com last week that there is evidence of UK consumer dissatisfaction with 60 per cent of Indian call centre work carried out at the transactional level.

Allen added that high quality Indian call centres remained market leaders in their field.