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Blackfriar: Jobs hang on Santander's threefold break with the past
THE news that the Bradford & Bingley name is to vanish from the high street early next year is an ignominious, if not entirely unexpected, end to a 150-year old savings institution.
The name is being scrapped as part of Spanish owner Santander's decision to kill off all three of its UK brand names. The other two – Abbey and Alliance & Leicester – will also disappear by the end of next year.
The other half of Bradford & Bingley, its 50bn loan book, will remain in state ownership and is unaffected by the rebranding.
Santander is claiming that Bradford & Bingley's customers will benefit from the move as instead of 338 Bradford & Bingley branches they will have access to 1,300 branches – which includes the Abbey and Alliance & Leicester sites.
But hang on a second. Is Santander seriously claiming that it will keep branches in cities and towns where there is more than one Bradford & Bingley, Abbey and Alliance & Leicester in the local area? It sounds most unlikely.
Santander is spending 12m on the rebranding and aims to save 180m from integrating the three businesses.
Around 1,900 jobs are going as the three UK banks are merged under the Santander name, which will leave a total of 23,000 UK staff.
According to Santander the response from staff has been the same as customers – very positive. Yes, but will they be as positive when the next round of job losses are announced? Blackfriar believes it is highly unlikely that only 1,900 jobs will go as a result of the merger.
As we have seen at Lloyds Banking Group, banks nowadays operate a dripfeed policy when it comes to redundancies.
Instead of announcing the job losses in one fell swoop we have weekly updates on a new tranche of a hundred job losses here, several hundred there.
It is a policy that has been heavily criticised by banking union Unite, which has accused Lloyds of embarking on a strategy of "death by a thousands cuts".
Rob MacGregor, Unite National Officer says: "The union will not accept a situation where Lloyds makes weekly announcements of hundreds of job losses. Staff must be told the company's plans for the future of the organisation and not be left with the uncertainty that they could be the next to lose their jobs."
The same should apply to Santander.
It will be very interesting to see if the Spanish bank still has 1,300 branches and 23,000 UK staff in a year's time. Expect the dripfeed news stories to begin over the next few months.
We don't often get good news from Yorkshire companies these days so it's refreshing to hear that Doncaster-based engineer Clyde Process Solutions has bucked the trend and announced record annual results.
Shares in the group leapt over 40 per cent last night and the board deserves recognition for doing so well in such difficult times.
Clyde realised last year that its heartland of supplying steel and iron companies was likely to dry up this year and it has since been proved right.
Steel, iron and other metals once accounted for more than a quarter of the group's turnover and this is expected to reduce significantly over the coming years.
With this in mind Clyde embarked on a major review and as a result it has stepped up its presence in traditionally defensive areas such as food, grains, chemicals and
minerals.
Even in a recession we still need to eat and we still need detergents and other household goods which are relatively immune to the downturn.
Clyde foresaw the problems ahead and took swift action. Other companies would do well to follow suit.
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Weather for Yorkshire
Wednesday 23 May 2012
Today
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Temperature: 11 C to 24 C
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