Rangers chief rejects India for home ground

The passage to India of thousands of low-skilled jobs suffered a jolt yesterday after a Scottish entrepreneur rejected it in favour of creating new jobs in Glasgow.

RHL, the call centre company owned by David Murray, is to create 450 new jobs after rejecting outsourcing the work to an Indian centre.

It said concerns over weak data protection laws, a high staff turnover and the costs of bussing in workers for night shift work had dissuaded it from sending the work overseas. Instead RHL, whose clients include BSkyB, ScottishPower and the Student Loans Company, is creating 225 jobs at a new call centre in Clydebank and a further 225 at its existing site. It is investing £2.8m in the new facility and in improvements to its existing centre next to Ibrox Stadium, the home of Glasgow Rangers football club.

Mr Murray owns Rangers football club and Murray International Holdings, a private conglomerate. A spokesman said RHL had looked at existing or potential call centres in India as well as others in the UK.

"A lot of customers phone during the day so staff in India would have to work a night shift and RHL found it would have to pay to bring staff to the contact centre," he said. "There was also an issue that companies based in India are not subject to Data Protection Act-type controls and that was something we could not get an adequate answer to."

He said the latest figures showed that half of the workforce at a typical Indian centre quit every year compared with less than a quarter at RHL, adding that there were also "accent issues".

He added: "David Murray is not playing a parochial card, he believes that contact centres have a future as a world-class business built here in the UK."

Lewis Macdonald, Scotland's deputy enterprise minister, said: "It shows that with the right support Scotland's contact centre industry will continue to grow."