Redundancy announcements will now be closely monitored

Redundancy announcements within the Scottish financial sector may have been coming thick and fast over the last year or so, but it seems accurate statistics are still relatively hard to come by. This is, however, likely to be more closely tracked in the future.

We're a little late on this, but the long-awaited report on the way forward for Scotland's financial industry by the Economy, Energy and Tourism Committee was unveiled last week after months of testimonies from high-profile industry figures.

Stripping through the political tub-thumping message about how banks should never again be allowed to "hold a gun to the collective head of the taxpayer", the bottom line of the report is that there should be more competition in Scotland's banking sector, and that much has to be done to repair its image in the minds of potential future employees.

Worryingly, though, the committee highlighted the "lack of accurate statistics" on redundancies north of the border and called for "better and more regularly updated baseline data on employment in the financial sector".

All in all, the report's 'conclusions' throw up a lot of questions and raise issues that need to be addressed in the industry while remaining fairly vague on details of how this will be achieved - particularly around employment.

For instance, it talks about breaking the duopoly of Lloyds Banking Group and RBS, through "increased competition and diversity". The benefits of new players in the banking sector would, of course, be increased employment opportunities.

However, this could also harm staffing levels within the existing Scottish banks, and possibly make Scotland less strategically important for them - thus harming the committee's ambitions to preserve banks HQ north of the border.

The Financial Sector Jobs Task Force is also welcomed for it's commitment to "alleviating the impact of redundancies in the financial sector in Scotland". Exactly how it plans to achieve this is not elaborated on.

The report also conceded that the financial sector may not be such an attractive career path for those currently in school, college and university, which could obviously hamper future growth.

"The industry should also be promoted as a potential area of employment to counteract any negative impact that the financial crisis may have had on interest in the sector. We expect this issue too to be covered in the report we have requested," it added.