Contractors working for Lloyds Banking Group face an uncertain future following announcements that the financial services group is planning a new IT structure that will result in a reduction of over 1,000 IT contractor assignments. In addition to the UK-based contracts that will be terminated or not renewed, a further 1,750 contractor roles offshore will also be lost.
The IT contractor cull is the result of an ongoing three-year plan to rationalise the group’s IT organisational structure following the acquisition of HBOS. According to Mark Fisher, Director of Group Operations at Lloyds Banking Group, IT contractors are being sacrificed to protect roles for permanent employees: “We have mitigated the impact on permanent staff with a significant release of temporary and contract staff.”
The Accord union is reported on BBC news to have identified the locations for the losses as London, Chester, Halifax and Edinburgh. In addition, the Unite union told BBC news that it was “an absolute disgrace” that Lloyds was cutting more UK jobs, given that it was “being kept alive by the taxpayer”.
For his part, Fisher is keen to position this drastic cut in UK and overseas contracting positions as actually benefitting the group: “The changes we are putting in place will give us a world-class IT operation that will benefit our customers and all our other stakeholders,” he claims.
Fisher confirms that the plan is to make the reductions by the end of 2011, so that the affected contractors will have some time to seek new assignments. He concludes: “We will work closely with the colleagues affected by [this] announcement to help them through these changes.”