From RBS to BHS

Edinburgh city council is going to offer grants to redundant bank workers to retrain for retail, construction and tourism.

Considering the fact that a good chunk of the latest round of redundancies at RBS are likely to occur in the group manufacturing division in Edinburgh - in various back office functions - and HBOS is set to make a large number of high street banking redundancies, it doesn't take a massive leap of faith to envisage former finance staff switching to these sectors.

Announcing the new bursaries for affected bank staff, the city's economic development convener, Councillor Tom Buchanan, says:

'Our city's economic resilience plan is in place and will further strengthen our ability to support those facing job losses. It will include rapid redeployment teams to secure job and training opportunities for people, building connections between those looking for work and those providing it.'

Still, it would seem that making a switch to some of these sectors might not be the greatest move. Figures from the National Statistics Office suggest that the volume of retail sales in the UK in February grew by 0.4% on the same period last year - the lowest growth since 1995.

A slumping property market also means construction isn't exactly a buoyant industry. As at December 2008, there were 31,000 redundancies within the sector in the UK.