Lloyds Banking Group says it will cut 1,600 jobs in UK lending shake-u

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Lloyds Banking Group PLC said it will cut another 1,600 jobs in Britain in a shake up of its lending businesses. Lloyds, 1 of two big British banks being propped up by the gov't., said it will close its 164 Cheltenham & Gloucester branches in Nov., eliminating 833 jobs. It will continue to offer mortgages under the C&G brand. The group's personal loans team will be moved to one site in London by the end of 2010, at the cost of 265 full-time jobs, mainly in Chester & it's cutting 140 jobs elsewhere in the personal loans business. Another 159 jobs will go as the Bank of Scotland & Intelligent Finance units cease writing new mortgages, it said. The company took on a load of bad assets when Lloyds TSB acquired Halifax/Bank of Scotland in a gov..-backed deal. That deal made Lloyds the nation's biggest retail bank but also forced it to seek support from the gov't., which now holds a 43.4% stake. HBOS logged a full-year loss of 7.5B pounds ($12.1B) in 2008, compared to a profit of 4.05B in the previous year. At the same time, Lloyds full-year profit TSB fell 75% to 819M pounds. On Monday, Lloyds announced it had raised 4B pounds in an open offer of shares, allowing it to repay 2.3B pounds of the gov't.'s 17B pound investment. Lloyds previously announced nearly 3,000 job cuts. At the start of the year, the group had 140,000 employees. Royal Bank of Scotland, now 70% owned by the gov't. confirmed separately it was cutting 500 jobs in its manufacturing division. Those cuts are part of a total of 7,200 which previously announced.