Chris Martin

"IT is not a core business, so outsource it" looks like a myth to me.

Absolutely - the only argument for outsourcing should be "Will it save me money and/or improve quality of my IT service deliveries".

Even if the answer to this is "yes" it needs to be done in the right way by a company who really understands the clients needs and puts forward a realistic proposal. The profit margins on outsourcing are far lower than the traditional IT/consulting business, so the company who makes the lowest bid may not be the right outsourcing partner in the long term.

Is this question really about "outsourcing", or "off-shoring"?

The company I work for has been involved in many outsourcing deals and the deals I've seen here in Sweden have used local employees - often the outsourced companies own ex-IT department which is purchased by the outsourcing company.

The cost savings are achieved by economies of scale - being part of a large company who's core business is IT instead of being an inefficient part of a company who's core business is something else and who aren't very good at IT.
The savings which are gained in this case are not huge (maybe a reduction in costs of 20% initially followed by 5-10% each year after that), but make an important difference to the clients.
The relationship with the client is necessarily close and they often work on site with the client.

This seems like fair game to me.

Off-shoring, on the other hand, is farming out this type of service to a low-cost country, and that will cause all the problems Mr. Boon mentions.

I suspect that in the very long term it will cause a "re-distribution of wealth" around the globe as these low-cost countries command progressively higher salaries and the high cost countries need to lower their salaries to compete.

Is there some other issue with outsourcing in the UK which I am missing?

There is a workaround which we have just discovered...
MSG(999,' ')
{note the space between the quotes}

This works because there is a new feature with 4.6 which allows you to put '%1' into a message and assign %1 a dynamic string by calling the message like this:
MSG(1,'string')
and define message 1:
'ERROR - %1'
(works for %2, %3 etc.)

We just realised that you don't even need to have the message there to do this.
Could have been been the introduction of this new feature that took away the beep on MSG(999) in the first place!