Jobs are set to be lost at Lloyds in Wolverhampton after the bank announced plans to offshore some of its IT facilities to India and cull back office roles.

The company is axing around 625 posts in various departments, impacting the bank's back office sites in the Black Country along with London, Brighton, Gloucester, Leeds and Halifax.

The move also includes offshoring up to 82 IT roles to India in what trade union Unite is calling a "race to the bottom".

Today's announcement is part of the 9,000 job cuts announced by the bank in 2014 which would also be followed by a recruitment freeze in several divisions, Unite said.

It added that many remaining staff would be asked to go through an assessment and selection process.

Among the impacted divisions are consumer finance, commercial banking, group risk and legal and strategy.

It is yet another blow for the West Midlands jobs market this week after both British Gas and Aston Villa announced they would be making redundancies.

Unite regional officer John Morgan-Evans said today: "It is alarming that Lloyds are continuing to offshore IT roles in the name of driving down cost.

"This simply means the bank wants to pay an IT worker in India less for the same work carried out in the UK.

"This disastrous race to the bottom hurts our members and inevitably impacts customers.

"Unite has made it clear that 'efficiency' cannot simply mean axing more jobs while expecting the same work to fall on fewer shoulders.

"The bank forgets these relentless cuts have a human cost."

Lloyds said it would be creating 195 new jobs across the affected business areas, leading to a net loss of around 430 posts under the previously announced three-year strategy.

A statement from the bank said: "As part of our group strategic review, we also announced 200 branch closures over the three-year period.

"Today, we can confirm that we will be closing 21 branches during July.

"Lloyds Banking Group is committed to working through these changes with employees in a careful and sensitive way.

"The group's policy is always to use natural turnover and to redeploy people wherever possible to retain their expertise and knowledge within the group.

"Where it is necessary for employees to leave the company, it will look to achieve this by offering voluntary redundancy.

"Compulsory redundancies will always be a last resort."