DRAWN to the region by pools of workers with friendly northern accents, at a time when manufacturing was declining, many companies brought their call centres to the North-East in the 1990s.

But as yet another centre leaves the region, experts are assessing whether the end is near for the industry, which employs 3.6 per cent of the North-East's workforce.

Although the closure of the Abbey centre, in Gateshead, was not due to off-shoring to India, it came as a reminder of the fragility of an industry that can operate from anywhere in the world.

Ranald Richardson, a Newcastle University academic who has researched call centres widely, has predicted the industry will be in decline by the end of the decade.

He said yesterday the threat to call centre jobs was particularly worrying for parts of County Durham, where large numbers of job seekers might not be easily absorbed.

He said: "The industry will plateau and then it will go into reverse, because of technology improvements and also off-shoring."

Abbey follows in the footsteps of other centres to shed jobs, including IBM in Stockton, Royal and Sun Alliance in Doxford Park, Sunderland, Norwich Union in York and Axa Insurance in Darlington.

Davey Hall, regional secretary of the union Amicus, said: "If someone is on $1 an hour and someone here is on £7 to £8 a hour, it is impossible to compete. A lot of our members are extremely worried.

"We will probably always have call centres here and part of that reason is the Geordie accent. But I can imagine there will be a gradual decline."

Andrew Sugden, of the North East Chamber of Commerce, was more positive.

He said: "We have no reason to think that we will see more closures, we think it is a very buoyant industry."