Scottish HBOS jobs protected, meaning staff in England and Wales may be hardest hit
19 September 2008
Thousands of jobs lie in the balance this weekend following the £12.2 billion takeover of HBOS by Lloyds TSB.
HBOS – the parent company of the Bank of Scotland and Halifax – and Lloyds TSB have a combined workforce of 142,000, but pressure is likely to be put on the new “superbank” to find savings through job cuts.
Although Lloyds TSB’s chairman, Sir Victor Blank, described estimates of 40,000 job losses as “ridiculous”, he refused to rule out any compulsory redundancies.
But it has emerged that a clause was inserted into the deal to protect jobs in Scotland, leading to fears that most of the redundancies will be in England and Wales. Scotland has 17,600 HBOS staff: of the total of 65,000 HBOS employees, this the largest concentration of anywhere in the UK.
The new enlarged group will continue to use HBOS’s historic Edinburgh head office as its Scottish headquarters and will still print Bank of Scotland banknotes in Edinburgh.
The merger of Lloyds TSB and HBOS has created the UK’s largest lender, with control of over a quarter of the mortgage market. Despite the fact that the government waived competition requirements to ensure the deal went through, chancellor Alistair Darling said yesterday that he was “extremely concerned” at the resulting job cuts for his local constituents in Edinburgh.
The banking union Accord has accused the government of “turning its back on thousands of finance workers” after supporting the deal to go through.
“If ever there was a case for government intervention this is it,” said Ged Nichols, general secretary of Accord. “If there was the prospect of job cuts on the scale some commentators are predicting in any other industry, there would be an outcry. It seems that the livelihoods of workers in the financial services industry do not matter to the government and that is a shame.”
The union, which has 32,000 members in the HBOS group, is seeking talks with Lloyds TSB.
Unite is also calling for “urgent talks at the highest level” with the banks and says it will not accept any compulsory redundancies as a result of the merger.
“Unite will be meeting with the other unions at HBOS and Lloyds TSB to ensure there is a co-ordinated effort to support the staff in this time of great uncertainty,” said general secretary Graham Goddard.
“The major job losses in the sector are fundamentally caused by precarious investments and transactions by bankers pursuing large rewards,” he added. “Staff working in the financial services must not pay the price for corporate greed.”