Royal Bank of Scotland is to close a further 54 branches in England and Wales with the loss of 258 jobs. The closures, in January 2019, come on top of the 162 branches the bank axed in May.
The Unite trade union was quick to condemn the move, saying: “It is utterly disgusting that Royal Bank of Scotland has the audacity to announce that yet more important local bank branches will permanently close their doors.”
The RBS group, which is 62% taxpayer-owned, said all the branches being closed are Royal Bank of Scotland-branded.
Explaining its decision, the group said customers were spurning the traditional branch counter service, where transactions were down 30% since 2014, in favour of doing their banking on the internet and mobile phones.
It added: “Customers of Royal Bank of Scotland in England and Wales will be able to use NatWest branches and local post offices for their everyday banking needs.”
The announcement means that after the New Year there will only be about 50 Royal Bank of Scotland-branded branches left in England and Wales.
Derek French, the former director of the Campaign for Community Banking Services (CCBS), said his prediction was that “by the end of next year, all the RBS[-branded] branches in England and Wales will be closed … they are not viable as a separate, standalone unit. South of the border, NatWest is their brand.”
The CCBS closed in 2016, although French is arguably the country’s leading expert on branch closures.
In May, RBS said it was closing 162 branches in England and Wales during the second half of this year with the loss of nearly 800 jobs. In December 2017 it announced the closure of 259 branches.
The latest announcement will fuel concern that many more communities will soon be left without access to a bank branch.
An RBS spokesman said the size and shape of its branch network across NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland “will be stable until at least 2020”.
The closures come after the European Union had originally demanded the sale of some branches as a condition of the taxpayer bailout a decade ago. RBS resurrected the Williams & Glyn name for the branches it put up for sale – which were RBS banks in England and Wales together with NatWest branches in Scotland.
However, it was unable to find a buyer, so the Williams & Glyn business is being reintegrated back into the core bank.
The spokesman said: “As we are no longer launching Williams & Glyn as a challenger bank, we now have two branch networks operating in close proximity to each other in England and Wales – NatWest and Royal Bank of Scotland. As a result we have reviewed our overall branch footprint in England and Wales and have made the difficult decision to close 54 Royal Bank of Scotland branches…
“We will now focus on investing in our Royal Bank network in England and Wales to make sure customers have a consistent range of products and services wherever they bank, be it Scotland, England or Wales.”
