About 400 admin staff at the Royal Bank of Scotland group in Bristol are waiting to hear if they are part of plans to axe 9,000 jobs worldwide.

Half the cuts will be UK workers as the bank culls backroom staff working for its global manufacturing arm in a bid to save £2.5 billion over the next three years.

RBS employs around 3,900 people across Bristol, including Coutts bank, NatWest and insurers Churchill and Direct Line.

These include 400 staff in what RBS calls "manufacturing" or administration roles.

The move brings the total job cuts announced by the beleaguered bank to around 15,000 worldwide since late last year.

RBS – which employed 106,000 UK staff at the end of 2008 – insists the jobs actually lost will be lower due to natural turnover, voluntary redundancies and other roles being created within the group. But Rob MacGregor, national officer at Unite, said: "Unite is appalled that thousands of people, who form the backbone of the RBS operations, are to be made redundant.

"These employees are totally blameless for the current position which RBS is in, yet they are paying for the mistakes at the top of the bank."

The bank is now 70 per cent owned by the Government after a £20 billion bailout after it racked up a UK record loss of £24.1 billion.

The jobs will go in areas which provide support for the bank's customer-facing businesses, such as back office operations, purchasing, IT services and property management.

As of the end of 2008 the division employed 45,000 people worldwide, including 27,000 in the UK, with major bases in Edinburgh and London.

The impact of the cuts is likely to be widespread, affecting staff of RBS-owned NatWest as well as insurers Churchill and Direct Line.