Call centre staff in India will now operate the UK’s National Rail Enquiries service.

National Rail Enquiries is to move its call centre to Mumbai, India, according to reports.

The train helpline has been in operation since 1996, and last year answered around 24 million calls from members of the public about train times, fares, and service disruptions.

It is currently operated by two different suppliers – more than two thirds of the service is operated in India and the rest is by staff employed through Ventura. However, UK-based Ventura has recently made 160 of the call centre staff redundant as National Rail Enquiries announced the move to one single supplier in India.

ATOC, which runs the helpline, said in a statement: “Call centre operations now represent only some 7% of rail enquiries and this proportion continues to fall, with the internet rapidly growing in importance for passengers looking for journey information. In the last financial year the amount of calls handled fell by 24.5%.

“Our monitoring shows that levels of customer satisfaction are the same for both the call centres. We can achieve significant savings by moving to one supplier and it makes sense to do so.”

The news came on the same day that BT announced it was returning its call centre jobs from India back to the UK. Reported in The Times newspaper, BT’s Chief Executive revealed the news in the company’s annual meeting, confirming that around 2,000 customer services staff will be repatriated.

National Rail Enquiries’ move is expected to be completed by December 2009. Although a controversial decision to some, Anthony Smith, Chief Executive of Passenger Focus, the UK’s independent rail consumer watchdog, told BBC News: “Passengers care that telephone and other information services are correct, useful and remain free or low cost. Where they are based is not so relevant.”