The issue of staff accounts is not going to go away, however much Lloyds and Accord would like it to.
In a new, shocking, development branch managers were told in call last week that any questions relating to the trawling of staff accounts should be directed to Accord because it agreed to Lloyds doing it in first place. That’s not what Accord has been telling its members.
Accord now needs to come clean about what it knew and when? Did it agree that the Customer Service Insight team could trawl through staff accounts before the pay negotiations began? Why is it still refusing to publish the data it got from Lloyds? If it’s anonymised, there is nothing stopping Accord from publishing the data. What’s it hiding? Accord needs to publish a timeline showing when the pay negotiations began and when it was presented with the staff data from Lloyds. It also needs to publish any emails, letters or minutes of meetings relating to that data.
Staff are furious that Lloyds trawled their personal current accounts on an industrial scale and Accord never objected to it. In a desperate attempt to shut down the hundreds of complaints from disgruntled members, Carol Knowles, President of Accord, said it: “challenged the data presented by LBG…and the data protection implications”. That’s not what the General Secretary of Accord said. He told the Financial Times the: “information… was helpful” and wait for it, “interesting”. Who is telling the truth? If you believed the information was “helpful” and “interesting”, why would you need challenge it?
I wonder how “interesting” the General Secretary of Accord would find it if he knew Lloyds had trawled through his personal account. Regardless of the legal issues, it’s a fundamental breach of trust. On the intranet site staff have said its: “unethical”, “underhand”, “sneaky”, “a breach of privacy”, “trust has been breached by both parties [Lloyds and Accord]”. Those are damning statements and Accord needs to come clean about what happened. In a bid to shut down the furious response from its members – or should I say ex-members because hundreds are leaving over what it did – Accord said it would respond to members concerns individually after a period of “calm reflection”. One wag asked how long that “calm reflection” would take! Another said: “There will be zero members left by time they finish reflecting.”.
And it’s also come to light that those members who have resigned from Accord were told by its General Secretary to resign from Lloyds because it produced the data. What kind of response is that to ex-members who are simply questioning why it didn’t object to the data being gathered in the first place and why it kept it secret?
Not surprisingly, Unite have decided to take an early Christmas break and are not responding to their members. Let’s be honest, Unite could call up all its members individually in 5 minutes to explain its position on the data trawl!
Double Standards By LBG
However, we shouldn’t forget that it was the Bank who trawled through 36,000 staff accounts without the express permission of the account holders. Lloyds likes to talk the talk but not walk the walk. It has said that its nine so-called dealbreakers (pretexts for sacking staff) are non-negotiable but that wasn’t true when it came to snooping through staff accounts.
Dealbreaker 1
“You always act in the best interests of our customers to ensure they get the experience they deserve.”.
Did Lloyds act in the best interests of 36,000 staff when it rifled through their accounts under the pretext of financial resilience. No, it didn’t. Lloyds should have asked for permission to do it and given staff the opportunity to opt out.
Dealbreaker 9
“You treat the data of our customers, businesses and colleagues with care, confidentiality and respect.”
Did Lloyds treat its 36,000 members of staff with “care, confidentiality and respect” when it trawled through their personal accounts to justify its pay increase? Again, no it didn’t. What the Bank did was sneaky and underhand. The fact it says the data used was anonymous and aggregated is irrelevant. It shouldn’t have collected it in the first place.
We believe that what Lloyds did, with the support of Accord, was a breach of the Data Protection Act. The Bank had no legitimate reason to access personal accounts and it wasn’t necessary to determine what it calls “financial resilience”. There were less intrusive ways of finding that information.
In our letter to John Edwards, UK Information Commissioner, we said:
“However, the fact that the data were aggregated and anonymised does not mean that those activities are exempt from the Data Protection Act. The data was taken from the personal accounts of employees and their spouses or partners without their express permission. Lloyds had no reason to access that data other than to justify its proposed pay increase. That’s not a legitimate reason under the Data Protection Act. The information was personal, non-employment based data, the collation of which wasn’t necessary to determine financial resilience. That could have been determined through less intrusive means. If Lloyds wanted to know whether its staff were resilient financially then it could have asked them directly. It chose not to do that. The data it processed served its interests and not those of its employees.”
The full letter is available here.
We will publish the response from Mr. Edwards on our website when we receive it. The individual letters for members to send to the Bank will be sent out in the next few days.
We will be returning to this issue again 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.