Lloyds to close Warrington call centre
LLOYDS Bank is to cut more than 180 jobs in Warrington with the closure of a telephone banking site at Park House, Centre Park just outside the town centre.
The bank said it was taking the step after seeing telephone enquiries fall by 25% since 2011.
A further 120 jobs carried out in Warrington will move to another centre in Speke, Liverpool.
The cuts are among 645 announced by the bank as part of its intention to shed 15,000 jobs. The latest round takes the total number of redundancies announced so far to 13,055.
The Warrington centre will close in the first three months of next year when the lease expires. The other jobs will go from human resources, consumer finance, retail and commercial banking.
The bank said: “Lloyds Banking Group is committed to working through these changes with employees in a careful and sensitive way. All affected employees have been briefed by their line manager today. The group’s recognised unions were consulted prior to this announcement and will continue to be consulted.
“The group’s policy is always to use natural turnover and to redeploy people wherever possible to retain their expertise and knowledge within the group. Where it is necessary for employees to leave the company, it will look to achieve this by offering voluntary redundancy.
“Compulsory redundancies will always be a last resort. In fact, since the strategic review in 2011 around only a third of role reductions have led to people leaving the group through redundancy.”
The union Unite claims more than 2,400 jobs have gone at the bank since the start of the year leading to “plummeting staff morale”.
National officer Rob MacGregor said: “This is the third tranche of job losses since the beginning of the year and is in danger of sending staff morale to an all time low.
“The closure of the Warrington centre will hit the local economy and risks damaging customer service. Lloyds staff have worked hard since it was bailed out by the taxpayer to make the bank a success. Their reward has been continual uncertainty and attacks on their pensions.
“Lloyds needs to give its workforce stability and guarantees of no compulsory redundancies. Only then will the bank be able to live up to its motto to ‘Make Britain Prosper’.”
Stephen Broomhead, chairman of Warrington’s economic development agency Warrington & Co, said: “We will be discussing with Lloyds ways in which we can assist the employees currently based at the Warrington office to help them find alternative employment through our Redundancy Action Support programme.
“We are optimistic that the affected employees will find alternative employment within the borough of Warrington which currently has third highest employment rate per capita in the UK and the fourth highest jobs growth rate.”
