The London Daily News

City News Desk – 3:20pm

The Royal Bank of Scotland has just announced it is cutting 2,600 jobs, the first major British company after the general election to announce job cuts, bringing the total number of employee’s in the state-owned lender to 22,600 since the banking crisis.

RBS has confirmed that 2,000 jobs will go from its Churchill and Direct Line branded insurance division and 600 will be shed from its retail banking arm.

RBS has said it also needs fewer people in its retail banking head office because it has been ordered to sell 316 branches by the European Union.

RBS, which is 84 per cent owned by the Government, pledged last year to identify £2.5 billion a year in cost savings.

An RBS spokeswoman said today to The Times, “We are working hard to rebuild RBS in order to repay taxpayers for their support and having to cut jobs is the most difficult part of this process. We will do everything possible to keep compulsory redundancy to an absolute minimum. So far the job losses we’ve announced to date have resulted in fewer than one in four people being made compulsorily redundant.”