Scotland to lose 1,000 jobs in latest Lloyds cull

Despite the redundancies announced at Lloyds banking Group this year, and last week's announcement to sell certain divisions, the firm has announced another 5,000 job cuts, around 1,000 of which will hit Scotland.

The overlaps caused by the merger between Lloyds and HBOS last year have yet to be entirely ironed out, and the latest redundancies are an attempt to reduce these. The 5,000 job losses will be throughout the UK in group operations, insurance and mortgage processing.

Though 1,000 jobs will go north of the border, the bank says that 500 of these will be permanent positions. There will also be some redeployments and a proportion of the job losses will be among temporary workers.

Understandably, this announcement hasn't gone down well with unions, particularly as this is the latest in a string of redundancy announcements at the group.

Ged Nichols, general secretary of Accord, said: "We always recognised that some job losses were inevitable as Lloyds TSB integrated HBOS operations, but the scale of changes announced today will leave many staff in shock."

But this shouldn't be entirely unexpected. Lloyds said that it intended to save 400m through 'cost-synergies' by the end of 2009, and in its half-yearly results released in August revealed that just 100m had been achieved thus far.

Lloyds' group director Mark Fisher said: "We will continue to work closely with our colleagues affected by today's announcement to help them through these changes over the coming year. We have mitigated the impact on positions through redeployment and the release of contractors and temporary staff."

The latest announcement takes the total number of redundancies at Lloyds Banking Group to an eye-watering 12,500.