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Protest Held In Peterborough Against Service Centre Closure
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Date: 15th Feb 2007
LTU was petitioning Lloyds TSB customers outside the Bank’s Peterborough branches – and the public at large in the main shopping areas – on Thursday 15th February.
The protest was in response to the Bank's announcement of its intention to progressively close its Service Centre at Thorpe Wood in Peterborough between July and December 2007, with the loss of all 243 jobs. On the same day, the same business unit responsible for the closure – Group Operations - also admitted that it intended to transfer a further 400 jobs to India during this year.
Though Senior Management at first insisted that the work being sent to India was unconnected to the ‘offshoring’, it subsequently materialised that it had already previously been developing plans to transfer work direct from Peterborough to India. Meanwhile, other Peterborough jobs are to be transferred to other UK sites, where surplus capacity is being created by work there being transferred to India. In other words, staff working in Peterborough are to be the victims of what is known as ‘offshoring by proxy’.
The Bank’s press office initially gave the media the impression that many staff may be redeployed – presumably in order to deflect public criticism of the closure – in its communications to staff the Bank has admitted that “local opportunities for redeployment will be very limited”. The Union predicts that no more than a dozen of the 243 affected staff will be found alternative jobs in the Bank … the remainder facing the prospect of compulsory redundancies.
The Union teams approached customers and the public to sign a petition in order to help put the maximum possible pressure on Lloyds TSB top management to reverse its decision to close the Peterborough Centre. The statement customers are being asked to sign read:
“I believe it is completely unacceptable that Lloyds TSB should be closing its Peterborough Service Centre with the loss of 243 jobs at the same time as it is ‘offshoring’ a further 400 jobs to India.
Lloyds TSB’s Top Management should recognise that it has a responsibility to its staff, customers and the local economy in Peterborough; keep jobs in the UK; and therefore reverse the decision to close its Peterborough Service Centre."
The campaign against the closure has also generated considerable local support. This has included the local MP, Stewart Jackson; local Council Leader, John Peach; and, representing the business community, John Bridge, Chief Executive of the Cambridgeshire & Peterborough Chamber of Commerce.
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