In complete transparency, I live in a household that’s Irish and Italian. Buying local  and using local service centres in those countries is simply part of everyday life. It isn’t about nationalism. It’s about understanding that strong local businesses create strong local communities.

The UK has never quite adopted that same mindset when it comes to services. Nowhere is that more obvious than in customer contact, where thousands of quality jobs have quietly moved overseas over the last decade.

We now talk about bringing manufacturing back to Britain. We rarely talk about bringing the service industry back

We are losing more than jobs

Contact centres have always been far more than somewhere to answer phones, live chat or email..

For generations they have provided one of the UK’s best entry points into employment, teaching communication, resilience, commercial awareness and problem solving. They have also created flexible careers for parents, students, carers and people with disabilities through home working and flexible hours. Every role that disappears offshore removes another opportunity for someone taking their very first step into work.

I’ve watched it happen

As the Managing Director of a UK contact centre business, I’ve watched hundreds of roles disappear overseas. There are no dramatic announcements when it happens. No factory gates closing. No national headlines.

Instead, contracts that once created employment in Newcastle, Sunderland, Glasgow and countless other communities are quietly transferred overseas, often by organisations that continue to present themselves as UK employers because they operate both onshore and offshore. That gradual shift has become almost invisible

Government rightly talks about reshoring manufacturing. Why is there so little conversation about reshoring services? Customer service employs hundreds of thousands of people and is every bit as capable of creating careers, tax revenue and economic growth as manufacturing. Yet it rarely features in industrial strategy

The official data only tells part of the story because UK businesses are not required to disclose how many service jobs they move offshore.UK contact centre employment has been declining by around 3.5 percent every year. Almost half of UK businesses now outsource overseas. UK organisations spend approximately £65 billion annually on offshore business process and IT services.

Redirecting only a fraction of that investment back into Britain could support more than one million jobs and generate billions in additional tax and National Insurance revenue. Repatriating just 5,000 contact centre roles could contribute around £35 million every year in income tax and National Insurance alone. This is not simply an employment issue. It is an economic growth opportunity.

Here’s the frustrating part: there is no single, official figure for how many UK service jobs have gone offshore over the last ten years because UK companies are not legally required to report their overseas headcount. Large corporates can run onshore and offshore operations side by side and quietly shift volume between them without ever having to disclose it. That alone tells you something about how this issue has been allowed to happen without scrutiny.

This is a career ladder

One of the biggest misconceptions about contact centres is that they are dead end jobs. In my own business, some of our leaders started as customer advisors. Today they lead operations, manage major client accounts, oversee finance, marketing, workforce planning, data analytics and project delivery. Home working, part-time hours, flexible shifts ,a good contact centre career can be built entirely around someone’s life, rather than forcing someone’s life around a rigid 9-to-5. That flexibility is genuinely rare in the UK jobs market, and we’re letting it disappear.

Every offshore decision removes the first rung from that ladder before someone has the opportunity to climb it.

We need support, not sympathy

Employing people in the UK costs more. Nobody disputes that. But every UK employee also contributes tax, National Insurance and spending power into local communities while building a long term career rather than relying on state support. Those wider economic benefits rarely appear in procurement decisions focused only on cost per contact.

If government and major organisations genuinely want to increase employment, reduce welfare dependency and stimulate regional economies, supporting UK customer contact should form part of that conversation.

It really should be coming home

Every year we delay, another generation loses one of the UK’s most accessible career paths. This isn’t about protecting an industry. It’s about protecting opportunity. Because every role that stays in Britain builds skills, supports communities and strengthens our economy. Perhaps it’s time we started treating customer service jobs with the same importance as every other industry and bring them home.

Diana Bourke
Founder and Managing Director, Echo-U

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