Memorandum submitted by Arrk Group
In 2006 members of the Committee visited our
offices in Navi Mumbai, India. Prior to that in 2004 we were visited
by Nigel Griffiths MP in his capacity as Minister for Small Businesses.
We are a small UK IT services business with
a wholly-owned subsidiary in India. We employ about 150 people,
25-30 of whom are UK nationals based out of our office in Mosside,
Manchester and about 120 are based out of our office in Navi Mumbai,
India.
We are a small UK business struggling to compete
against large Indian and US IT competitors. We pay taxes in the
UK. We employ UK nationals as well as Indians. We provide services
to UK business to help them compete on the global markets. We
are not a traditional "offshore" IT company. We have
a "hybrid" model where we employ a mix of UK national
and Indians and provide customers with the `best of both worlds'
from both UK and Indian IT industries. We operate our business
as a single organisation, single team located in two countries.
We are pioneers in this having been operating like this for over
five years now. You could call us one of a new breed of "Small-Medium
Sized Globally Integrated Enterprises".
When we met the Committee members in India in
2006 we discussed with them the sorts of problems we were facing
with visas and work-permit processing. We discussed some of the
problems we had faced over the previous few years and I explained
that they had caused us great difficulty and seriously disadvantaged
us against our large-scale Indian competitors. We also discussed
the matter of caste discrimination in India and the need for UK
companies operating in India to be sensitised to these issues
and their attendant human rights implications.
It would seem that despite the recommendations
that the Committee made to the Government regarding visa processing
for IT workers—and the assurance that the Government gave
you—things have now become substantially worse. My team
and I are "pulling our hair out" over the fact that
it now seems that we will have to wait on average 18 days to get
a visa in India for employees travelling to the UK to undertake
assignments requiring work-permits—despite us being members
of the British Deputy High Commission "Business Express Programme"
(BEP). I must say that over the past five or six years the British
Deputy High Commission in Mumbai have been very helpful and that
until this unfortunate incident the BEP has worked extremely
well.
In a business like ours the ability to react
quickly to a customer's demands and to deliver solutions in short
time scales is of paramount importance. We very often have to
move people around the world at very short notice. This recent
policy change is going to cause us a massive issue and may well
result in project failures, a loss of business and subsequent
inevitable loss of jobs amongst our UK nationals in Manchester.
I cannot over-emphasise the seriousness of this situation. The
Government are clearly shooting themselves (and I have to say
small British businesses) in the foot here. These actions are
in stark contrast to the response given by the Government to your
Report only seven months ago (not printed here);
I would be very grateful if you could assist
us in taking this matter up with the Government. Nigel Griffiths
has kindly suggested that I write to Tony Lloyd MP and Gerald
Kaufman MP and request that they in turn write to Alistair Darling
MP at the DTI and John Reid MP at the Home Office and I will be
doing this tomorrow. However, the fact that the Government has
flown in the face of your advice seems to me to be something that
perhaps you are better placed to raise with them than I.
If you can spare the time to follow up with
the Government ministers concerned and would like some further
infomation please do not hesitate to contact me.
30 May 2007
| 
