Re: Just asking (for a friend naturally)
It's worse than that - Indian consulting companies mostly pay little or no tax for their Indian employees' UK wages when they're onshore in the UK. I worked for one such company and HMRC give them a tax concession for bringing in workers to plug a "skills shortage" (and they do it for all of foreign companies plugging a "skills gap"), besides we had to train most of them once they got here.
The concession is that the foreign workers pay no PAYE or National Insurance on the wages for the first year and then some NI in the second year, so all the Indian company would do is send the worker back to India after 2 years and replace them with another with all the clock now reset for all the tax advantages on wages.
This surely would create a skill shortage amongst UK nationals because a UK company can't compete with Indian company with a big tax advantage. It also deprives the government purse and then we're expected to plug it!