Industry news

Etihad Airways, the national airline of the United Arab Emirates, yesterday opened its Manchester guest contact centre with a reception for government officials and local business leaders.

Based at the Voyager Building at Manchester Airport, the guest contact centre is the airline's first in Europe and fourth in the world. It will operate in conjunction with existing guest contact centres in Abu Dhabi, Al Ain and India.

The guest contact centre will provide full time employment for 160 local people, all of whom will receive extensive training in all aspects of the company's global reservations system.

More than 1,100 jobs from central government departments and agencies were outsourced to the private sector in the last financial year, new research has uncovered.

The findings, uncovered through a series of questions tabled by former Labour cabinet minister Frank Dobson, have prompted union fears that savings are being made not through efficiencies, but through cuts to pay and conditions of staff, as evidence emerges of hundreds more outsourcing schemes being tendered across the country.

CSC swung to a fiscal third-quarter loss on a $1.49 billion write-down of its investment in a disputed contract with the U.K.'s state-run health service.

However, adjusted earnings were better than anticipated, pushing shares up 2% to $26.99 in recent premarket trading. Through the close, the stock is down 53% in the past year.

New business awards totaled $4.1 billion, up from $2.3 billion a year earlier.

The government is to yet again extend the deadline for those suppliers who wish to join its G-Cloud framework and a posting on the G-Cloud website revealed that a “CloudStore” is on its way.

The idea of the CloudStore is that it will offer up to 1,700 cloud services from 600 suppliers and the Government is said to be currently accrediting these services. Whitehall and governmental bodies can then pick and choose what cloud services they require. The first first tranche of G-Cloud services are expected to be rolled out in February.

Emergency repairs group HomeServe is planning to cut 200 call centre jobs from its UK business after a damaging mis-selling scandal last year.

The company, which provides cover for household emergencies such as broken boilers, said the cuts would reflect its "smaller outbound telephony operation".

Last year, the group suspended all telephone sales and marketing activity after an independent report found call centre staff were mis-selling products.

Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude has announced plans for an academy to boost the skills of senior project leaders across government to deliver complex ICT and other projects.

Each year two groups of about 25 people will enter the Major Projects Leadership Academy for a 12 month formal programme covering three primary themes: major project leadership, technical understanding of major project delivery and commercial capability.

The Major Projects Leadership Academy will be fully launched in October 2012 and managed by the Cabinet Office Major Projects Authority (MPA). At the moment it is suggested that around half of the government ICT projects are behind schedule.

Almost 1,000 jobs are to be lost at Lloyds Banking Group.

More than 500 staff are expected to be made redundant with the closure of administration sites in Newcastle, Scunthorpe and Romford.

About 217 workers from its West Midlands site in Dudley are to be moved to another location.

The group is still considering where to make the remaining job cuts, which come as part of a restructuring of its business. However back office staff are among the worse affected.

A US firm has been awarded the multi-million-pound contract to print the tickets for the London Olympics, sparking criticism from UK businesses.

Up to 11 million tickets will be produced by Weldon, Williams & Lick, based in Fort Smith in Arkansas.

But the Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) said local companies had been "left out of the loop". The committee said the contract was awarded following a "competitive and open procurement process".

Advisers will have to charge their clients VAT if they offer them an outsourced discretionary fund management (DFM) service.

A new draft version of HM Revenue & Customs’ (HMRC) guidance on VAT exemptions for financial advice after the retail distribution review (RDR) has removed any reference to outsourcing to a DFM as it does not deem it an advised sale under the RDR.

New rules on outsourcing to DFMs are being reworked into a separate VAT guidance paper.

The fate of over a billion dollars worth of information technology outsourcing contracts is in limbo after Thursday's US Supreme Court verdict cancelling 122 licences of telecoms firms.

The order comes at a time when both Indian and multinational IT firms like Wipro, Tech Mahindra and IBM, besides business process firms such as Firstsource, Intelenet and Aegis, have signed multimillion-dollar deals with telecoms firms including Uninor, Etisalat DB, Videocon and Idea.