A COMMUNICATIONS company serving Scotland, Northern Ireland and the North-East has shown its faith in Teesside workers by creating 41 jobs in Stockton.

The newcomers will man a central information technology help-desk call centre at ntl's base at Preston Farm Industrial Estate.

The new posts take the number of people employed at Stockton to 595, an increase of 91 since the end of 1999.

Fiona Shaw, ntl's service manager for the region, Northern Ireland and Scotland, said the decision to base the call centre serving 26,000 of its employees was a reflection of the experience and commitment of existing staff.

She said: "We already had a large and successful information technology team on Teesside and knew we would be able to provide a high quality service for ntl staff around the country.''

The help-desk will be manned 24-hours-a-day, seven- days-a-week, and can be contacted by phone over the company's Intranet by any member of staff with a computer problem.

Some problems can be fixed immediately by the help-desk staff, while others will be forwarded to other teams at the relevant ntl site.

More than 300 people applied for the 41 posts, and all but one live in the Tees valley area.