Dr Vipal Singh, the Director & Head of People and Places, Lloyds Technology Centre, Hyderabad was boasting on LinkedIn that it’s only taken 6 months to recruit 1,000 staff and it’s just the beginning! How many more highly skilled UK IT jobs are going to be offshored to India?
Dr Singh says: “We are growing with gusto, hiring hundreds of colleagues. Our journey is far from over. We have only arrived!”. It’s clear that the Technology Centre in Hyderabad is growing at pace and will soon have the largest number of IT staff in Lloyds Banking Group.
In seeking to defend the Bank’s position at a recent meeting, Mr. Ron van Kemenade, Group Chief Operating Officer, was asked: “how is employing people in India ‘Helping Britain Prosper’?” Mr Kemenade was reported to have said that because “hiring people in India (Lloyds couldn’t find the right people in UK) helped Lloyds Banking Group achieve its goals and that was Helping Britain Prosper.”. Even after three glasses of red wine, that makes no sense whatsoever. Is he saying that the prosperity of the whole British economy, with a gross domestic product of £2.27 trillion pounds in 2023, is dependent on Lloyds succeeding?
Equally, when Lloyds was on skid row and in need of a taxpayer bailout, I don’t recall the Indian Government offering to help. And the very idea that we don’t produce enough IT graduates is also abject nonsense. What Mr Kemenade really means is that Lloyds can get the same IT skills more cheaply in India. It’s a money saving decision, nothing more.
We said before that Lloyds had plans to increase that number of staff in India significantly over the next 2-3 years but what we didn’t realise was that it was going to get to 1,000 within a matter of months.
There are hundreds of Lloyds staff who would give their right arms to develop these IT new skills. Why doesn’t Lloyds give staff individual training budgets to allow them to acquire the skills that are going to be needed in future. Amazon does it very successfully. Why can’t Lloyds? In addition, why doesn’t Lloyds commit to establishing 500 IT Apprenticeships per year for the next 3 years to train the home-grown IT specialists it’s going to need for the future.
That’s Helping Britain Prosper, not offshoring jobs to India.
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