UK financial services giant Lloyds Banking Group has announced that it is to cut 1,600 permanent jobs from its IT and operations divisions as well as thousands of contract staff.
The cuts form part of the company’s programme for integrating HBOS, the banking and insurance provider it took over in January 2009. They will be made by 2012, it said in a statement.
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“The changes we are putting in place will give us a world-class IT operation that will benefit our customers and all our other stakeholders,” said director of group operations Mark Fisher.
On top of the 1,600 permanent jobs, Lloyds Banking Group is axing 1,150 temporary and contract roles in the UK and 1,750 offshore contractor roles. This brings the total number of jobs cut to 4,500.
The company says it hopes to use natural turnover, i.e. waiting for staff to leave or retire, as much as possible and will redeploy workers where it can. “Where it is necessary for employees to leave the company, it will look to achieve this by offering voluntary severance,” the statement reads. “Compulsory redundancies will always be a last resort."
Having lost around £6 billion in both 2008 and 2009, Lloyds Banking Group turned a £1.6 billion profit in the first half of this year. At the time, it said it was “well positioned to deliver strong financial performance over the coming years".
Last month, state-owned Royal Bank of Scotland announced that it plans to cut around 1,000 IT jobs.
In other jobs news, a report from PricewaterhouseCoopers estimated that the government’s spending cuts will lead to around half a million job losses in the private sector.
