RBS 'plans to cut 880 London IT jobs'

The Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) is slashing its London IT function by 40% in a cost-cutting exercise it expects to complete by 2020, according to Unite.

The union claimed this 650-role reduction in permanent staff, coupled with a planned 65% cut in contractors of 230 roles, will equate to 880 lost jobs.

RBS didn't confirm the number of expected job losses, but its London IT staff will number 950 after the cuts. The union revealed another 300 UK IT role redundancies at the bank in May as the bank continues to downsize, though RBS said at the time that, coupled with new jobs, the figure actually stands at 92 redundancies.

Rob MacGregor, Unite national officer, said of the latest cuts: "By 2020 just a fraction of the RBS IT function will remain, leaving this organisation operating a skeleton service with the customers and remaining staff paying the price.

"RBS's fixation with cutting employee numbers, restructuring and offshoring work that could reasonably be done by displaced staff within the RBS IT community is unacceptable. This British taxpayer-funded bank should be concentrating on investing in jobs here in the UK, rather than wholesale cuts."

The government bailed out RBS in 2008's financial crisis, and still holds a 71% stake in it.

An RBS spokesperson said: "Inevitably as RBS becomes a simpler, smaller bank focused on the UK and Ireland, our technology function will undergo reorganisation and will reduce over time.

"As we develop long term plans for our technology business, we have in the interests of transparency, started to share our emerging proposals on a future operating model with Unite. We have not consulted on any headcount reduction, instead sharing a direction of travel with Unite which is subject to change."

They added: "Our proposed plans are designed to reduce the number of contractors we employ and strengthen our permanent workforce and while we are downsizing in London we are reinvesting in other UK hubs."

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