Just last week figures emerged which signalled an upturn in IT contract opportunities within the financial sector. However, it has just emerged that Lloyds Banking Group have cut 370 contract roles with the majority of jobs going in IT support.
These new job cuts will be on top of the 400 contract job losses already announced by Lloyds Banking Group. In total, since the merger of HBOS and Lloyds, 8,200 jobs have been cut including 800 contractor positions. A Lloyds spokesperson could not confirm how many of the fresh job cuts would affect freelance staff.
They released a statement which said, “The group’s policy is to use natural turnover and to redeploy people wherever possible to retain their expertise and knowledge gap within the group. Where it is necessary for colleagues to leave the company, it will look to achieve this by making less use of contractors and agency colleagues.”
IT contractors working for the Group have already had their pay rates cut by a total of 20% over the last year.
The bank has been criticised for retaining its workforce abroad despite the high level of job cuts in the UK. Speaking about his issue, the Lloyds TSB Group Union (LTU) said, “Even though both the Bank’s IT and Collections and recoveries operations are directly supported by well over a thousand staff based in India – and the bank are flying into the UK many more IT staff from India who are paid low salaries – the axe has fallen entirely on the jobs of UK staff.”
They continued, “So, for instance, whilst Collections and Recoveries intends to reduce from 8 to 6 the number of sites in the UK that it intends to operate from – existing sites in Andover and Southend – it is insisting upon leaving the three operations in India untouched.”
Source: crystalumbrella.
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