MORE than 100 jobs are likely to be lost in Plymouth after the Royal Bank of Scotland announced the closure of its St Andrew's Cross building.

The centre, which houses administration and IT staff, will shut in two years' time under plans to more than halve the number of the bank's administration centres across the UK.

A total of 3,500 jobs are under threat, including 112 in Plymouth, although the firm says it hopes to redeploy an unspecified number of workers at locations which are yet to be named.

Terry Keefe, who is the Plymouth regional officer for the Unite union, said: "With the job losses Plymouth has suffered already, anything like this will be hard to stomach.

"There's little good news around at the moment in Plymouth. This will be a further dent in people's confidence.

"The next thing will be a cutback in personal spending with concerns about job security.

"I just hope this is the last (bad news) we get for a while."

He said Unite would be locked in talks with RBS bosses over the next few weeks.

RBS, which is 83 per cent owned by the taxpayer, will close 12 of its business services centres, including Plymouth, and put three under review.

The bank said the latest jobs cull would start next year and run through to the end of 2012.

The blow comes just a week after RBS revealed that 14 of its 27 offices in the Churchill and Direct Line insurance arm were being axed.

It also comes on top of 9,000 redundancies RBS announced last year, of which 4,500 were in the UK.

Mr Keefe said: "Being a mainly Government-sponsored bank, it's not the best of moves."

All the latest 3,500 job cuts will affect the bank's UK administration workforce. The business services division previously employed about 45,000 globally.

The bank will retain ten back-office centres, but in addition to Plymouth, it will also close centres in Leeds, Bolton, Enfield, Harrogate, Bristol, Borehamwood, Liverpool, Milton Keynes, Telford, Bradford and Norwich.

RBS said about a third of the job cuts came as a direct result of the sale of 318 branches to Santander, which it was ordered to offload by the European Commission.

An RBS spokesman said: "Having to cut jobs is the most difficult part of our work to rebuild RBS and repay taxpayers for their support. We continue to make efficiencies across our business and adjust our plans in line with the divestments we have been required to make by the EU.

"We will do all we can to support our staff, offer redeployment opportunities wherever possible and keep compulsory redundancies to an absolute minimum."