We have just about emerged from the pandemic and Lloyds has seen fit to announce a further 48 branch closures across the Group, with the loss of 178 jobs. That brings a total of 148 branch closures since the beginning of the year.

How many more branches are going to go be closed over the next 12 months? How many are going to go over the next 3 years? Charlie Nunn, the new Chief Executive, needs to come clean about his plans for branches and jobs rather subjecting branch staff to this endless game of wait and see. You can’t keep saying branches will be used for face-to-face appointments, like mortgages for example, when you’re doing everything possible to force customers to use the digital and mobile channels and there won’t be many branches left for them to visit. More importantly, a few years ago when the Competition and Markets Authority looked at competition in the personal account market one of the arguments used by the ‘big-four’ banks to justify their control of 86% of the market was that they provided large branch networks in the public interest. That’s increasingly no longer the case.

We’ve said it before but Lloyds needs to publish its staffing requirements and open voluntary severance registers for each Division. Lloyds can then identify the jobs that are going with the staff that want to leave, and everyone else can get on with up-skilling ready for the future.

Redundancy Terms

The first stage of calculating entitlement involves working out an individual’s weekly earnings upon which Redundancy Payments would be based. The total pay figure is then divided by 52 to arrive at a weekly figure.

The formula for calculating Severance Pay is 2 weeks’ pay for every year of service under age 22, 4 weeks’ pay for ever year of service aged 22 to 40, 6 weeks’ pay for every year of service aged 41 and over. Only the last 20 years service is used in the calculation and payment is capped at a maximum of 104 weeks’ pay.

The first £30,000 of any Redundancy Payment is paid tax-free. Severance payments apply to all staff aged between 16 and 65. Payment is based on each individual’s length of service in the Bank, up to the date of termination and are rounded up to whole years based on age at last birthday. For example, service of 12 years 1 month at date of leaving would be rounded up to next whole year – 13 years.

For those staff who joined the Bank after 1st January 2012 the severance terms are calculated differently. For each year of service under the age of 22 staff get 1.375 weeks’ pay year of service. Between the ages of 22-40 staff get 2.75 weeks’ pay per year of service and 4.125 weeks’ pay per year of service over the age of 41. Service is rounded down to the nearest whole number of years and takes account of age as at the last birthday.

The total value of any redundancy payment under this scheme is capped at £165,000.

Members with any questions on the latest round of job losses should contact the Union’s Advice Team on 01234 262868 (Option 1).

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