Since the financial crash, the vast majority of Britain’s high street banks have pulled out all the stops to ensure they are run more cost-efficiently on both a local and national level. This has led to widespread closures and redundancies within the banking sector which are becoming an all-too-regular occurrence.
Now Ulster Bank, owned by RBS, has announced that 39 branches will close and hundreds of workers will be left without jobs in a bid to return the chain to profitability. The closures will affect mainly rural areas throughout Ireland, although Ulster Bank has, as yet, not released further information on which branches will be closed.
In future the bank will concentrate the majority of its efforts on urban areas and its online banking division.
Sammy Wilson, Finance Minister of the Northern Ireland Assembly, voiced his concerns over the closures which could leave hundreds of customers without access to a local branch, and reiterated his earlier suggestions as to how banking chains could ensure their account holders continue to receive an acceptable service.
He said; “I know that banks are in competition but one of the things I have been suggesting to them is rather than all banks removing branches from provincial towns, why can’t they work together to spread them across towns in Northern Ireland? In some cases, that would help.”
This most recent closure announcement adds to the 950 jobs cut in January 2012, and experts estimate that as many as 1,800 workers in total could be made redundant by 2016.
This amounts to almost a third of the chain’s workforce and has caused outrage in banking unions across the country.
The Irish Bank Officials’ Association (IBOA) described Ulster Bank’s approach to staff and customers “cavalier” and claimed the mass cuts have come as a “bolt from the blue”.
“While everyone is aware that Ulster Bank’s parent, RBS, is in some disarray at the moment and its commitment to its Irish operation has been the subject of much speculation recently, I sometimes wonder if the senior management in Ulster Bank are deliberately trying to sabotage the bank’s future by their cavalier approach to their customers and staff,” said general secretary Larry Broderick.
With the issue still being discussed by the finance committee of the Northern Ireland Assembly there is a slight hope that customers in rural areas will not lose out on a local banking service. However, with cuts remaining an all too common theme in the banking industry, it is doubtful that a resolution will be found in time to save the hundreds of workers soon to be made redundant.
