At the same time as reporting record profits and a £50 million windfall dividend for its parent company, TSB is proposing to give its staff a miserly 6.5% pay increase. And that at a time when inflation is running at 13.4%. To put it simply, every member of staff in TSB is going to be significantly worse off as a result of one of the worst pay deals in the finance sector.
TSB reported record profits of £183.5 million, up 16.5% from the previous year. Trumpeting the results, Mr. Robin Bulloch, TSB’s Chief Executive Officer, said:
“I want to thank all of my colleagues for rising to meet the challenges of the past year and helping to build our customers’ money confidence, at a time when this has never been more important, as well as enthusiastically getting behind our growth strategy for the coming years.”
Sabadell, TSB’s parent company, is going to be significantly better off than staff from the record profits. It is getting a £50 million dividend payment. If Mr. Bulloch really wanted to “thank all my colleagues” for the record profits, then he could have used some of that dividend payment to give staff an inflation busting pay increase.
To put the TSB pay increase into context, Lloyds staff are getting pay increases of between 8% to 13% of salary, that’s on top of higher cost of living payments over the last few months and performance bonuses in March.
In our last Newsletter we said: “The on-target Variable Pay Award (VPA) which is paid to all staff in March 2023 should be paid in full. We will not accept any reduction in the amount of that award because of the FCA and PRA fine. TSB’s IT disaster was a failure of executive leadership and they should own it. It was left to hardworking staff to put it right and that’s what they did”.
Fortunately, TSB has not tried to reduce the VPA bonus and all eligible staff will get 11.8% of basic pay in March. That will be welcomed by hard working staff but it’s no substitute for a pay increase in line with inflation.
We will be producing a further analysis of the bank’s pay proposals next week. In the meantime, members with any questions can contact the Union’s Bedford Office on 01234 716029 (Choose Option 1).
MEMBERS SHOULD PASS THIS NEWSLETTER ON TO THEIR COLLEAGUES SO THEY TOO CAN BENEFIT FROM THE ONLY INDEPENDENT TRADE UNION IN TSB.