Lloyds boss: We will help 3,000 EU staff stay in the UK
LLOYDS Banking Group is working to help more than 3,000 staff stay in the UK if their right to work here is taken away as a result of Brexit.
Lloyds boss Antonio Horta-Osorio told The Mail on Sunday that the bank had identified around 5 per cent of its staff working in the UK came from elsewhere in the EU.
Horta-Osorio himself is Portuguese but has dual citizenship, meaning he will be unaffected.
He said: ‘We are going to support them as much as possible, we would like to have clarification as soon as possible.’
The rights of EU citizens not born in the UK are up in the air as part of the negotiations following the EU referendum vote.
While the Leave campaign was at pains to point out that people already working here would be allowed to stay, Prime Minister Theresa May’s Government has refused to make the same commitment until it is clear that UK citizens living in the EU will also be allowed to stay where they are. The Mail on Sunday revealed earlier this month that one FTSE chief executive had sought advice about officially obtaining permanent residence in the UK in the run-up to last month’s referendum vote.
Permanent residence status is a prerequisite to applying for British citizenship.
Business advisory firm KPMG said it had helped the unnamed chief executive of a FTSE100 blue-chip business. The firm has seen a tripling in demand for advice on immigration law since the vote.
Around one fifth of the top 100 UK-based firms – including Unilever and AstraZeneca – are run by bosses born elsewhere in the EU.
Separately, Lloyds was facing criticism from a union this weekend that it was ‘hounding’ staff over ‘minor rule breaches’. The Lloyds Trade Union, which describes itself as an ‘independent trade union’ which is not affiliated to the TUC, said in a newsletter that the bank has been disciplining staff for breaking rules on making transactions on their own bank accounts, or reimbursing one-off charges to colleagues at the bank.
‘The question is why the bank would waste massive amounts of resources on such an apparently trivial issue when simple coaching plans and informal warning would have done the job much more cheaply,’ the LTU said.
A bank spokesman said: ‘We are investigating a small number of branch colleagues for an internal process issue, highlighted by routine internal monitoring. As the investigation is ongoing, the details remain confidential at this time.’
The bank said last week it is cutting several thousand jobs and 200 branches as customers move to carrying out all of their banking transactions online.