Leader: Should government be allowed to offshore?

There are plenty of good reasons why the government would want to offshore some IT work.

Most private sector outsourcing deals will assume some level of offshore development now in order to keep costs down. The big banks in particular have decided they can get good value, high quality development done offshore.

Lower costs for government should also mean lower taxes for the public, which might make it an attractive option. After all, should the government be subsidising skills which are available cheaper elsewhere? Perhaps some of the money saved could be put towards retraining workers with skills harder to offshore.

And if the banks - who arguably worry more about security than any other business - are happy about the levels of security offered offshore, then why should the government worry? After all, it can hardly be worse than the levels of data safety we have already.

There are, of course, also some excellent reasons why the government should steer clear of offshore development.

On a purely political level it is pretty much impossible to justify deals that involve cutting jobs in the UK and moving them abroad.

Like it or not, the government has to take a wider view than a private business. Offshoring a few jobs might save money today, only for it to be paid out tomorrow to unemployed workers on the dole. And you can bet any savings would quickly disappear into the black hole of government accounting, never to appear again as tax cuts.

Also, many people would feel uncomfortable about having their personal information sent to another country. What if relations between the UK and the offshore country hit a rocky patch? We'd feely extremely vulnerable if companies in that country had all of our tax records.

This debate resurfaced today as a leaked document revealed the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) may consider offshoring IT work. When news of the leak was put to the DWP, it responded as if it had been caught in a sting by the Fake Sheik and bleated that it had no plans to offshore.

And then it admitted that some of its suppliers might use sub-contractors that are based abroad.

Here we have the big problem. Government use of offshoring is an important issue on so many levels - the future of skills and the IT industry, government spending and even national security all could be impacted by the decisions made.

What we need is an open debate on these issues, not for it to be swept under the carpet by a government worried about how the tabloids or unions will respond.

But at the moment decisions about whether jobs are sent out of the company are being made by businessmen - those executives running the companies who've won government contracts - not by our elected representatives. The responsibility for making these sorts of decisions is one thing we should not let the government outsource.