The Royal Bank of Scotland is cutting 92 techies’ jobs in plans to outsource them to India, according to reports.

The partially taxpayer-owned bank is slashing a total of 334 jobs, according to trade union Unite, while The Scotsman newspaper breaks that figure down as 154 contractors to be let go by the end of this year, with another 180 roles put “at risk” of redundancy.

An RBS spokesperson told the newspaper: “As RBS moves towards becoming a simpler, smaller UK-focused bank, we’re continuing to restructure our back office support and reducing its size so it’s a better fit for our business. Unfortunately, these changes will result in the net reduction of 92 roles.”

Affected departments, according to the trade union Unite, will include: CTO; Finance Solutions; CPB Technology; NatWest Markets Technology; Controls; Performance and Business Management (P&BM); Core and Payments; PBB Technology; Digital Engineering Services; Risk Solutions; and EC Solutions Technology.

Rob MacGregor, Unite national officer said, in a canned statement: “It is wholly inappropriate and unjustified for these technology roles to be sent offshore. Unite has called on RBS to halt the offshoring announcements and impose a moratorium on the offshoring of jobs. The loss of these jobs to India does nothing to support the well-being and livelihood of UK workers and their families, this is not in the taxpayer interest.”

The British State owns about 74 per cent of RBS, which it bought up partly to prevent the bank collapsing altogether in the wake of the 2008 economic recession.

Back in 2012 an “inexperienced operative” at RBS managed to completely knacker the entire RBS group’s ability to process payments for the 16.7m customers of RBS, Natwest and Ulster Bank after inadvertently wiping a mainframe scheduler during a software update. Then-CEO Stephen Hester insisted the failure was not related to outsourcing of IT jobs to India or lack of investment, though we noted at the time that the firm had been hiring techies in India to work on the system which suffered from the borkage. ®