Fears as 50 banking jobs go to India

LONDON (Reuters) - Lloyds TSB Group Plc (LLOY.L: Quote, Profile, Research) will shut five processing centres with the loss of 465 jobs to cut costs, the company said on Wednesday.

The centres, which help administer accounts, are in the Welsh cities of Swansea and Cardiff and in Taunton, Plymouth and Stockton, the bank said.

Staff will be offered redundancy or jobs elsewhere in the company, a spokeswoman for the bank said. The work carried out at the centres will be transferred to bigger sites in Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Peterborough, Chelmsford and Andover by the end of the year, the bank said.

Lloyds TSB Group Union, which represents 45,000 of the bank's 80,000 staff, said the job cuts were directly linked to the bank's transfer of jobs to India. There is spare capacity at the bigger sites because of the movement of jobs overseas, the union said.

"It is unacceptable that even more jobs are to be lost in vulnerable communities across the UK merely because Lloyds TSB can replace staff in the UK with workers paid a fraction of the salary in India," Steve Tatlow, buttistant general secretary of the union, said in a statement.

But the bank said this was not the case.

"This is in no way linked to offshoring," the Lloyds TSB spokeswoman said. The bank had already spelled out which jobs would move this year to India, where Lloyds TSB will have between 2,000 and 2,500 workers by the end of 2005, she added.

Lloyds TSB has a reputation as a cost-cutting bank and managed to keep expenses flat last year. It shut a call centre in Newcastle last year with the loss of 968 jobs, shifting the work to India. With loan growth set to slow this year, banks will be clamping down further on costs, analysts have said.

The cuts at Lloyds TSB follow Tuesday's announcement by Spain's Santander Central Hispano (SAN.MC: Quote, Profile, Research) that it would cut an extra 1,000 jobs at mortgage lender Abbey, which it bought last year.

National Australia Bank (NAB.AX: Quote, Profile, Research) said earlier on Wednesday that it would shut 100 branches at its Clydesdale and Yorkshire banks in the next 18 months.

In further industrial strife, finance trade union Amicus said its members at HSBC (HSBA.L: Quote, Profile, Research), the country's biggest bank, voted for a one-day strike on May 27 over pay. The union and bank have been at loggerheads since HSBC announced 3,500 job cuts last year.