The owner of Bank of Scotland is considering moving its registered office from Edinburgh to London if Scots vote for independence.
The news comes on the same day a YouGov poll for The Times put support for independence at 47 per cent, only six points short of the 53 per cent who say they want to remain part of the UK.
Lloyds Banking Group, which is 25 per cent-owned by the British government, has finalised contingency planning ahead of the vote on September 18. Executives are considering having the group’s registered office in London, with Bank of Scotland operating from Edinburgh as a foreign division of the business, Reuters reported, citing unnamed banking sources.
A spokeswoman for Lloyds said: “The scale of potential change is currently unclear, but we have contingency plans in place. In the event of a ‘yes’ vote in the referendum, there would be no immediate changes or issues which could affect our business or our customers. There will be a period between the referendum and the implementation of separation, should a ‘yes’ vote be successful, that we believe is sufficient to take any necessary action.”
The bank’s registered office, its official legal address, is in Edinburgh, meaning that it would be classed as a Scottish bank in the case of independence. That would mean that the Bank of England would no longer be the so-called lender of last resort, to provide a backstop if Lloyds runs into trouble.
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Both Lloyds and Royal Bank of Scotland have said that an independent Scotland could have a significant impact on compliance costs, taxes and credit ratings. Scottish-based banks have assets worth 12.5 times the country’s economic output. Economists have questioned whether an independent Scotland would be big enough to host Lloyds as well as Royal Bank of Scotland, its rival.
Last week, Douglas Flint, the chairman of HSBC, warned of the dangers that a vote for Scottish independence could pose to the financial system north of the border. Mr Flint, who is Scottish and was airing his views in a personal capacity, said that a vote to leave the Union could prompt “capital flight” from Scotland and leave its finances in a “parlous state”.
A YouGov poll showed support for separation had risen by eight percentage points in a month.