Fury as RBS ships more jobs abroad

By ROB DAVIES FOR THE DAILY MAIL
Updated: 06:00 EST, 3 September 2010

Royal Bank of Scotland sparked a furious reaction from union leaders as it emerged that it is shipping more jobs overseas as it axed a further 3,500 in Britain.

Unite, Britain's largest union, said it expected 500 jobs to be shifted to RBS operations in Singapore, India and the US.

A spokesman for the taxpayer-owned bank (up 0.35p to 46.13p) confirmed that many positions would be moved abroad, but said the bank had not yet decided how many.

Bank backlash: RBS employees have been hit by another jobs cull as 3,500 face the axe

Unite spokesman Rob Mac-Gregor said the news would be a 'bitter pill to swallow' for British employees of the bank, which is 84 per cent owned by the taxpayer since its £20bn bailout in 2008.

'The news that the Royal Bank of Scotland is to cut another 3,500 staff from across the UK is a horror story,' said MacGregor.

'The scale of the cuts announced today beggars belief and staff across the country today will be left reeling from this news.'

The cuts will be felt in back office administrative centres around the country, 12 of which are to close.

Ten centres will be retained but staff at Leeds, Bolton, Enfield, Harrogate, Bristol, Borehamwood, Liverpool, Milton Keynes, Plymouth, Telford, Bradford and Norwich are all under threat.

RBS said it needed to beef up its teams overseas so that administrative staff could be closer to areas where it is gaining new customers.

'Unlike many of our competitors we remain committed to our long-standing principle of situating customer contact work within the country or region where the customer is located,' the bailed-out bank said.

It also pointed out that the majority of its 160,000- strong workforce is based in the UK.

A spokesman for RBS said a third of the job cuts are because the bank will have 2million fewer customers, after it was forced by the European Union to sell 318 retail branches as a condition of receiving state aid.

The branches were sold to Spanish banking group Santander in a deal worth £1.65billion.

The remaining two thirds of the headcount reduction is related to chief Stephen Hester's efforts to streamline costs as the bank continues with a three-year plan to claw its way back to self-sufficiency.

'Having to cut jobs is the most difficult part of our work to rebuild RBS and repay taxpayers for their support,' the bank said.

This latest round of redundancies, beginning in 2011, will take the total number of jobs cut since RBS was bailed out to 23,000, of which 17,000 were shed in the UK.

More at thisismoney.co.uk/rbs