London, May 11 (Reuters): British bank Lloyds TSB Group will shut five processing centres with the loss of 465 jobs to cut costs, the company said on Wednesday.

The centres, which help administer accounts, are in the Welsh cities of Swansea and Cardiff, in Taunton and Plymouth in southwest England and Stockton, northeast England, the bank said.

Staff will be offered redundancy or jobs elsewhere in the company, a spokeswoman for the bank said. The work carried out at the centres will be transferred to bigger sites in Glasgow, Manchester, Birmingham, Peterborough, Chelmsford and Andover by the end of the year, the bank said.

The Lloyds TSB Group Union, which represents 45,000 of the 80,000 staff, said the job cuts were directly linked to the bank’s transfer of jobs to India. There is spare capacity at the bigger sites because of the movement of jobs overseas, the union said.

“It is unacceptable that even more jobs are to be lost in vulnerable communities across the UK merely because Lloyds TSB can replace staff in the UK with workers paid a fraction of the salary in India,” Steve Tatlow, assistant general secretary of the union, said in a statement.

But the bank said this was not the case.

“This is in no way linked to offshoring,” the Lloyds TSB spokeswoman said. The bank had already spelled out which jobs would move this year to India, where Lloyds TSB will have between 2,000 and 2,500 workers by the end of 2005, she added.

Lloyds TSB has a reputation as a cost-cutting bank and managed to keep expenses flat last year. It shut a call centre in Newcastle last year with the loss of 968 UK jobs, shifting the work to India.