A powerful union representing 42,000 employees of Lloyds Banking Group has alleged that its frontline workers are denied extra pay unless they push products to customers, casting doubt on the bank's pledge to clean up incentive schemes and stamp out mis-selling.

 

Lloyds Trade Union has also claimed that the "overwhelming majority" of bank workers believes volume of sales remains the biggest influence on performance ratings directly linked to pay.

Lloyds told The Herald in March 2013 that it was moving on April 1 to a 'balanced scorecard' rewards system based on customer feedback.

Earlier this year the Financial Conduct Authority insisted that all Britain's big banks had revamped their systems to ensure employees were no longer wrongly motivated to sell products like payment protection insurance (PPI).

But LTU claims that branch-based customer banking advisers are still effectively being assessed on their sales performance in the bank's latest pay assessments.

Mark Brown, union general secretary, said: "The evidence we have seen...shows that staff in front line customer-facing roles are disproportionately more likely to receive the bottom two performance ratings than staff in other parts of the bank with less direct customer contact. Even within retail branches there is a performance bias against customer-facing roles."

A Lloyds Banking Group spokesman said: "We review our variable pay and performance management approach on a quarterly basis. From January we will make further changes to the way we measure and reward performance, with variable pay based solely on customer feedback."

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