Can the government guard Scottish banking jobs?
It’s taken a while, but Scotland’s Financial Services Advisory Board (FiSAB) has created a task force to minimise redundancies in the sector north of the border. After its first meeting since the pre-Lehman collapse, halcyon days of early September, FiSAB has outlined plans to establish a Finance Sector Jobs Task Force. Sounds grand doesn’t it? In practice, it’s a collaboration between industry players, unions, the government, Scottish Enterprise and Universities Scotland, which aims to minimise job losses in the sector and prevent a brain drain from the industry north of the border. First minister Alex Salmond says the Scottish government is “determined to do all we can to protect and retain the skills and experience of the sector”. It’s not assuming it can stave of job cuts entirely, but instead aims to ensure “maximum levels of employment are retained”. Those who do lose their jobs will be offered the help by the task force to transfer their skills, whether through “self-employment,
