Lloyds confirms plans to axe nearly 1,000 jobs in bid to reduce costs and focus on digital banking

• e-mail

Lloyds Banking Group has confirmed plans to cut around 1,000 jobs in a bid to reduce costs and focus on digital banking.

The state-backed giant (up 0.7p to 72.8p) said it is cutting about 945 jobs as part of a restructuring plan first outlined a year ago.

The staff affected are currently employed within the bank's retail, commercial banking and consumer finance teams, and in several back office divisions, the taxpayer-backed lender said.

Jobs axe: The cuts form part of the 9,000 role reductions and 150 branch closures Lloyds announced last year

’The group's policy is always to use natural turnover and to redeploy people wherever possible to retain their expertise and knowledge within the group,’ the bank said in a statement. 

The cuts form part of the 9,000 role reductions and 150 branch closures announced last year as part of a three-year strategy which ends in 2017. 

This includes a £1.6billion investment in digital services and increased automation which Lloyds hopes will save it £1billion a year by the end of 2017.

All the major banks are shutting down branches as more customer bank online or on their smartphones.

More than 2,300 of the 9,000 jobs are thought to have already been cut so far, while the state-backed lender's total cull is now running at around 50,000 since its rescue takeover of Halifax Bank of Scotland in 2008.

The job cuts come a day after the Treasury reiterated its plans in the Autumn Statement to sell around £2billion of shares in Lloyds to retail investors next spring, backed by a nationwide TV, print and digital campaign.

The Government was left with a 43 per cent stake in Lloyds after its £20.5billion bailout following the group's HBOS takeover, but has already cut its holding to just under 10 per cent by selling tranches of shares to institutional investors.

The long-delayed official report into the failure at HBOS last week blamed senior managers and the bank's board for its collapse.

Up to 10 senior HBOS bosses may face being banned from roles in the City and on company boards as regulators said they would look at whether further sanctions could be taken.