French insurance group Axa is to cut 700 call centre jobs in the UK and transfer some of the work to India in order to reduce costs.
Axa will cut 220 jobs at it call centres in Morecambe and Darlington as it scales back its Axa Direct general insurance business.
The company will also cut another 250 general insurance jobs and plans to switch up to 230 more jobs to Bangalore, India.
Axa already has about 800 workers in Bangalore, of which about 600 support its UK business with the rest serving the US, Australia and Japan.
Commenting on the news, financial services union Amicus says it has been fully consulted from the outset and has worked with AXA to ensure that redundancies are kept to a minimum.
In contrast, the union criticised the 'bad industry practice' employed by UK bank Abbey which announced plans yesterday to move 400 call centre jobs to India and switch 900 jobs from Edinburgh to Glasgow without any consultation with Amicus.
Amicus says almost 2000 financial services jobs have been lost to offshoring since Christmas and calls for the Government to enter into talks to develop a strategy to maintain the service sector as a crucial source of employment for the UK.