West Yorkshire was dealt another blow last week, with news that the Lloyds Banking Group is planning to make a cull of around 4,500 staff – almost 700 of these from Leeds and Halifax alone.
Around 450 of those affected will be from the IT departments in Halifax, a quarter of which were permanent roles. The rest will be made up of IT roles in Leeds, around half of which were permanent jobs.
The high number of temporary roles affected were originally advertised, after the bank’s merger with HBOS in 2008, to consolidate the various banking software systems involved.
A number of local politicians, including Linda Riordan, Labour MP for Halifax, have voiced their concern over the job losses, fearing that they will cause mass unemployment throughout the area, from which it will take years to recover. Together with proposed public sector job cuts, there will, they state, simply not be enough jobs to cater for this surge of unemployment.
A pity then, that this was not addressed as part of the quote by Lloyds’ director of operations, Mark Fisher, who sounded positively chipper – about the future of the company at least. He says: “Today marks another major step in bringing our businesses together. 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”.
I’m sure you’ll agree that the company having a world-class IT operation will offer excellent consolation to the 22,000 ex-Lloyds employees who will have been made redundant over the last year or so and have struggled to make ends meet ever since then.
Linda Riordan says she hopes that there will be a concentration of focus and effort made to help the area in its time of need. From what Lloyds has officially said, it appears not…
Tags: banking, Halifax, jobs, Leeds, Linda Riordan, Lloyds Banking Group, redundancy, Unemployment