British business is facing increasing pressure to move jobs abroad to cut costs and there is no sign that this global trend is set to reverse, an industry survey showed yesterday.

India and China top the list of destinations where British businesses are already doing plenty of offshoring as well as for those companies who were considering it, with Poland and the Czech Republic following.

"The pressures on companies to offshore... are intense, and rising," said Ian McCafferty, chief economist at the Confederation of British Industry, ahead of the employers group's annual conference in the central English city of Birmingham.

More than half of the 150 companies the CBI surveyed said pressure to move business overseas - as a growing number of American companies are now doing - has increased over the past two years and a bit more than a fifth said very greatly so.

But the report said that while Britain has clearly lost jobs from offshoring - leading to a loss of about four per cent of a given company's UK workforce - the economy has been able to replace those jobs elsewhere and add even more.

At 4.7 per cent, the international measure of UK unemployment is at its lowest in 20 years and is less than half than the jobless rate in France and Germany.

New jobs created in Britain as an offspin from offshoring tend to be skewed towards skilled and graduate-degree workers, said CBI director-general Digby Jones, who added that within 10 years there will probably be no work left in Britain for unskilled workers.

"The challenge is to create more jobs than we lose - which we are doing - and to ensure people have the skills to take advantage of them," Mr Jones said.

The UK financial services industry has been at the forefront of recent transfers of jobs to low-cost countries. Aviva, Britain's biggest insurer, plans to shift up to 7,000 posts to India by the end of 2007 to cut costs.