Over 11, 000 foreign workers are being brought into Britain by Indian IT companies each year, invoking questions of the country’s work permit scheme by the Unite trade union.

The Sunday Telegraph has released Home Office figures obtained after a two-year battle under the Freedom of Information Act, showing that six of the largest Indian IT outsourcers recruited 11,644 immigrants to work for them in the UK in 2006.

The companies that featured are Tata Consultancy Services, Wipro, Mahindra-BT, Mastek, Infosys Technologies and Satyam Computer Services.

Over a seven-year period these companies were granted work permits to bring 47,000 foreign nationals into the UK. The Home Office could not say how many have settled in the UK and how many have returned to their homeland.

In response to the new data, British trade union Unite has raised questions, saying that while it is possible that only foreign workers have the skills required for the specific jobs in question, the granting of work permits "should not be at the cost of resident workers". The union thinks that Indian companies may be "undercutting" British pay rates in the UK by securing work permits to foreign workers and paying them much less than what their British counterparts would earn in the same rank.

However, while Unite wanted to know if these positions could have been filled by UK residents, no mention was made as to the actual availability of sufficient UK IT talent. The new figures appear to confirm the ongoing industry worries about IT skills gaps and the dearth of new IT graduates being produced by UK universities.