On a grim day for British jobs, the struggling Royal Bank of Scotland said yesterday that it was preparing to make 1,000 redundancies while the global bank Citigroup began to hand out P45s in London.

This latest spate of cuts brings the total number of jobs lost by big companies in Britain this week to more than 16,000. On Thursday BT underscored the arrival of the financial crisis in the real economy as it announced plans to cut 10,000 jobs by the end of March, after workforce reductions elsewhere at Virgin Media, Yell and GlaxoSmithKline (GKN).

RBS, which needs a £20 billion taxpayer-backed bailout, said that it planned to cut up to 3,000 staff across its worldwide workforce in the next few weeks. The banking giant employs about 170,000 across the world, with 100,000 in Britain.

The bank will reduce its workforce in its global banking and markets division, where about one third of the workforce is based in Britain. The bank’s retail branch network — it is the owner of NatWest in the high street — will not be hit by the expected round of cuts, however.

RBS’s insurance operations, including Churchill and Direct Line, are also thought to be escaping job losses.

The cuts could prove controversial for the bank, one of a handful being part-nationalised by the Government.

RBS is poised to raise £20 billion, including an issue of £5 billion of preference shares to the Treasury, in a move destined to mean that the taxpayer becomes the bank’s majority shareholder. Banking sources emphasised that RBS was responding to market conditions. It is set to report a full-year loss, the first in its 300-year history.

Citigroup, one of the world’s biggest banks, has said that it plans to cut 22,000 jobs globally this year. Yesterday the bank earmarked 10,000 job losses, some in London. Thousands of jobs at the company have been lost already, hundreds of them in the City.

There were fears that GKN would have to cut staff a second time after the car parts group issued its second profits warning within weeks yesterday as demand continued to fall. The manufacturer said in October that all 1,400 of its temporary workers will be laid off by the end of the year.

The London-based financial services sector is, for the first time, bearing the brunt of the economic downturn. Insiders expect many of the RBS job cuts to fall on the London arm of ABN Amro, the Dutch bank that RBS took over just before the credit crunch hit last year. The redundancies will compound a slew of City job cuts at other investment banks, including UBS, Merrill Lynch, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley, in addition to the new cuts at Citigroup.

Morgan Stanley, it emerged on Wednesday, plans to cut 4 per cent of its global workforce of 4,500. The Centre for Economics and Business Research, the think-tank, forecasts that 6,500 jobs will be lost in the City this year.

The dramatic numbers of redundancies could bring benefits, however, for those parts of the public sector that have posts to fill.

Across the labour force as a whole, from August to October there was a 6.3 per cent reduction in vacancies, compared with July to September, according to the Office for National Statistics. But Britain’s schools and hospitals and the continuing military deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq remain sources of employment.

The NHS has about 10,000 jobs on offer in England at any one time, not all of them for those who are medically qualified. A spokesman for NHS Employers said that there were “great opportunities for people who hadn’t thought about a career in the public sector but have very transferable skills”.

Amid continued reports of severe manning shortfalls — the full-time trained strength of the Armed Forces was almost 6,000 below target as of July — military careers offices are keen to attract recruits. The Army is continuing its One Army recruitment campaign, and infantry recruitment is up this year compared with last.

The London Olympics is perhaps the biggest recruiter. The Organising Committee will need about 3,000 staff by 2011-12 and is expanding its workforce from the 200 that it employs at present. Peak employment at the Olympic park building site will be about 20,000 in 2010.

Not all public sector employees are safe, however. Town hall employees are facing cuts as councils restructure and seek to balance their books.

This week’s losses

10,000 jobs expected to be cut at Citigroup, some in Britain

10,000 losses at BT, many in Britain

3,000 jobs worldwide to be cut by Royal Bank of Scotland

398 redundancies at JCB, on top of 178 announced three weeks ago

250 jobs to go at Leyland, the lorrymaker

2,200 jobs to go at Virgin Media over three years

1,000 job losses at Yell

1,300 further cuts at Taylor Wimpey

620 losses at GlaxoSmithKline

Source: Times database