Scottish insurance market no longer looks so hot

For all the pomp surrounding the raft of employment opportunities within Scotland's insurance industry, it's not exactly exhibiting signs of buoyancy. One firm is scaling back its expansion plans, another has made fairly deep cuts and salaries have largely remained frozen.

With the turmoil surrounding Scotland's banking sector, both Scottish Financial Enterprise and the recent annual report by the Financial Services Advisory Board have been quick to point to the resilience of the insurance sector.

While esure's plans to create 500 jobs in Glasgow supports this view, other events suggest all is not rosy. Aegon has plans make 147 redundancies in its life division in Edinburgh and Aviva says it is going to drastically scale back its Scottish expansion plans.

David McMillan, chief operating officer for Aviva's general insurance arm, told The Scotsman: "When we started out with this journey of restructuring, we had estimated 400 to 500 more jobs across the two Scottish sites. But the current climate has meant we're probably looking at around half that now."

A recent survey by recruiters Joslin Rowe suggests that underwriting roles are still very much in demand, but generally salaries are not faring particularly well.

"Every other year the upper end of the salary range would have gone up by a few thousand pounds - this year the upper end stayed static and in addition most people found they were mainly securing the lower end. It's not quite affected the average yet but we would expect that to drop by the time of our next release in September," said a spokesperson for the firm.

Insurance salaries in Scotland:

Source: Joslin Rowe