INFORMATION technology workers from developing nations are coming to Britain in numbers second only to nurses, a Freedom of Information Act request has revealed.

As many as 22,000 foreign IT workers were issued with work permits for the UK last year, of whom 85 per cent were from India.

The Association of Technology Staffing Companies (ATSCo), which extracted the figures from the Home Office, cited the figures as evidence of Britain’s shortage of home-grown talent.

The organisation said that the number of technology graduates entering the IT sector was “critically low”, given that there was a rising demand for IT skills.

It said that the figures also show the first evidence that multinational companies are operating an “offshore, onshore” model, in which they recruit workers in low-wage economies, such as India, and transfer them to operations in the West, while not lifting them on to Western pay scales.

Ann Swain, ATSCo’s chief executive, said: “Skills shortages continue to be a major pull factor in bringing foreign IT workers to the UK, but the concern is that some organisations may be taking advantage of the visa system to import cheap labour from abroad.”

The total cost of employing a worker in India, including the cost of benefits, can be between a fifth and a tenth of the cost of employing somebody doing the same work in the UK.

Ms Swain called on British companies to invest more in training underutilised professionals from Britain rather than rely on overseas skills.

The news of Britain’s reliance on workers from India comes as companies look increasingly to take advantage of the “offshore” outsourcing industry, moving back-office data processing roles and software development roles to countries such as India.

In recent years companies have also moved more highly skilled roles offshore.

However, there has also been evidence of a backlash, with some companies reversing decisions and bringing work back to the UK, or moving it to Eastern Europe.

LogicaCMG and Xansa, both British-based IT groups, have taken advantage of the offshore outsourcing trend by building up their own centres in Asia.

A growing recognition among outsourcing companies that they also need a British base has encouraged Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro Technologies and Infosys, the large Indian outsourcers, to increase their presence in the UK, with an inevitable impact on the flow of workers between the two countries.

The permit figures, uncovered by ATSCo, show that 18,248 work permits were granted to Indian IT professionals in the year to June 2005, with 1,081 granted to American IT workers and 464 permits to Australian IT workers.

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