Why you should be glad Scottish Widows is no longer for sale

The for sale sign above Scottish Widows, as tentative as it was, has been removed and its employees north of the border have reason to feel relieved.

Lloyds Banking Group is believed to have ruled out the sale of Scottish Widows, according to reports on Bloomberg.

A sale wouldn't necessarily mean huge redundancies, but acquisitions usually involve some. What's more, Standard Life was hotly tipped as potential buyer, which would have inevitably led to duplication and job losses.

Few opportunities in Scotland's insurance firms

Should these job cuts have come to pass, finding a new opportunity in the Scottish life and pensions market currently would have been problematic to say the least.

Standard Life is still in the process of implementing the 480 job cuts in Scotland announced in September last year, while Aegon has recently announced 213 redundancies while staff in Edinburgh are still waiting to hear where the axe will fall on the anticipated 600 UK job cuts.

Scottish Widows has not been without its problems. It cut around 470 roles in IT and shared services towards the end of last year and around 200 jobs in 2009. It has, however, been hiring - for risk, actuarial and accounting roles, according to recruiters.

Removing its name from the Scottish insurance sector would have been another blow to the already muted life and pensions recruitment market north of the border.

"We're still seeing roles within insurance, but these are largely operational rather than customer-facing roles," says Margaret Dyer, director of Joslin Rowe in Scotland. "There's little in the way of volume recruitment."

One consequence of this retrenchment within the life and pensions sector in Scotland is that people appear to be leaving the industry (or at least moving south of the border).

In the Joslin Rowe Scottish financial services review this year, life and pensions team members were cited as one of the most challenging roles to recruit for.