Following our recent Newsletter, Lloyds Banking Group has admitted that it trawled through the personal accounts of all staff in Grades A – C to justify its pay increases for 2026 and 2027. That decision – which must have been sanctioned by either Mr. Charlie Nunn or Ms. Sharon Doherty or both – has been met with anger by staff inside Lloyds and incredulity by outside commentators.
BTU’s Newsletter exposing the illegitimate trawling of staff accounts has been covered extensively by the Financial Times and all the major broadsheets.
For those members who missed the story, before this year’s pay negotiations began Lloyds accessed the personal accounts of 36,000 staff in Grades A-C to determine whether they were financially resilient or not. It then shared that information with the in-house staff unions, which never objected to what Lloyds had done, and used that data to justify its low pay increases.
The now infamous email said:
“One concerning point raised by LBG was their use of internal data to assess financial resilience. They reviewed 36,000 colleague accounts (those with 4 years’+ service) and concluded that we are more financially resilient that the general public. This was used to justify a lower pay award. Simon personally challenged this, highlighting that our loyalty in banking shouldn’t be used against us in pay negotiations. The response from LBG was “No Comment.”
Lloyds tried to defend what it had done by saying it “anonymised and aggregated the data” before using it. That’s an irrelevant smokescreen put up by Lloyds following the media backlash. The information it used was taken from 36,000 personal accounts without the permission of the account holders. There was no legitimate reason for Lloyds to access that information. In legal terms the use of that data was not ‘necessary’ because it served the Bank’s interests and not those of its customers. Moreover, the process of creating aggregated information from personal data is still governed by the Data Protection Act.
In response to the data breach, Lloyds quickly put some questions and answers on the pay website but only made matters worse. It said: “We are transparent with customers when using aggregated data”. No, it’s not. When did Lloyds write to 36,000 staff telling them that it was accessing their personal accounts and using their personal data to produce its pay proposals? It didn’t. It took the information without asking. What Lloyds still fails to recognise is that many of those accounts belong, in part, to customers who are not its employees.
A copy of our letter to the Information Commissioner will be published on the Union’s website. We are also producing letters for members and their partners who are joint account holders to send to Mr. Charlie Nunn and Mr. Robim Budenberg, Chairman, demanding an apology for the data breach. Those letters will be going out in the next few days.
Accord – World Class Apologists!
Come rain or shine you can always rely on Accord’s General Secretary to take the Bank’s side in any dispute with staff. He’s got form! Members will recall he was the Bank’s star witnesses in our legal case for 15,000 non-signers. We won and Lloyds had to pay out millions, but he did his level best to undermine the case.
In defending Lloyds again, Accord’s General Secretary said: “The information that was provided to us [taken without permission from 36,000 Lloyds staff] was helpful in the context of how employees are managing through the cost-of-living crisis.”. Lloyds PR team couldn’t have said it better.
One commentator on the FT website said: “If I was a member of Accord I’d be leaving immediately. Whose side are they on?”. Accord is so scared of being derecognised by Lloyds – something else that was covered in the infamous email – that it will do anything and say anything the Bank wants. Sometimes you’ve got to get up off your knees and fight back. Accord’s not capable of doing that because it’s too dependent on Lloyds.
Its own ballot showed most of its members rejected the Bank’s pay deal. That’s after the Bank gave staff time off to vote. 44% of Accord members couldn’t be bothered to vote because they knew it was a waste of time.
We will be returning to this issue in our next Newsletter. In the meantime, members with any questions can contact the Union’s Bedford Office on 01234 262868 (Choose Option 1).
MEMBERS SHOULD PASS THIS NEWSLETTER ON TO THEIR COLLEAGUES IN HALIFAX & LLOYDS SO THEY TOO CAN BENEFIT FROM THE ONLY INDEPENDENT TRADE UNION IN LLOYDS BANKING GROUP.