‘Lloyds could ditch final salary pension scheme’
August 21, 2009 at 3:40 pm
There’s more bad news for employees in the banking sector as Lloyds has become the latest bank to consider scrapping its final salary pension scheme. This comes just days after staff at Barclays threatened to take strike action surrounding the bank’s decision to discontinue its final salary pension scheme.
There’s no doubt that the banking sector is in crisis, and it looks like the employees are going to suffer the most. Lloyds recently confirmed that it has already started to standardise the terms and conditions of its employees as it begins the integration process with HBOS.
The DB (defined benefit) scheme, as it is known, had already been closed to new members way back in 2003. But the bank has now gone a step further by looking into reviewing the final salary pension scheme of its current employees.
And it’s not just the banking sector that is considering such a move: oil giant BP has also said that it will be closing down its own scheme in the near future.
A spokesperson for Lloyds said that they were “reviewing our total reward package across the group”, and they confirmed that this would include pensions. However, no firm decisions have yet been taken, even though it looks likely to go ahead with the action. For this reason they have not yet begun consultations with unions.
The LTU, which is the largest union operating at Lloyds, has expressed its concern at the bank’s likely decision. After hiring actuaries to try to determine how much the staff are likely to lose in benefits they came up with a figure of £4 billion.
