IBRC seeks recruitment firms to provide contract staff in UK

The State-owned bank running down the former Anglo Irish Bank and Irish Nationwide is seeking recruitment firms to provide contract staff in the UK in anticipation of further staff departures.

Irish Bank Resolution Corporation, formerly Anglo, has tendered for a panel of recruitment companies to find permanent, fixed-term and temporary staff in the UK.

The bank employs about 120 staff in offices in London, Belfast and Manchester but wants to be ready to use contract staff to reduce costs at the nationalised bank if more employees leave.

Alan Dukes, IBRC chairman, told an Oireachtas committee earlier this week that the bank was losing staff at an “unacceptable rate” as rivals were head-hunting employees by offering higher pay.

He said that short-term contract staff accounted for a quarter of the bank’s 1,000 employees.

IBRC has pointed to the difficulty of retaining employees when as a wind-down bank it cannot offer long-term employment, higher pay to hold on to staff or pay performance bonuses based on the recovery of loans. Staff numbers will fall from a peak of about 2,250 at both Anglo and Irish Nationwide to below 800 at the end of this year, excluding 230 staff working for the IBRC unit dealing with the National Asset Management Agency loans.

More than €8 billion of IBRC’s €27 billion loans (before bad-debt provisions), or just under a third of all its loans, at the end of June 2012 were in the UK.