The number of careers soon to be affected by job cuts in Edinburgh is on the up and financial services redundancies in the capital could soon hit 1,100.

In July, a labour market report by Mackay Consultants predicted that up to 2,000 jobs could be lost in the financial services industry in Scotland, but with the preamble that these would be restricted to the slumping property sector.

Now, consultancy Atisreal has added its two pennies of gloom, saying that the problems at Scotland’s two largest banks could result in a second wave of job cuts – both at the banks themselves and the legal and accountancy firms that provide services for them.

It says 1,100 of the estimated 30,998 financial services jobs in Edinburgh will be lost.

Keith Steventon, head of research at Atisreal, tells us: “Calculating these numbers is difficult, but we can say that of all the major cities outside of London, Edinburgh is the most vulnerable to these second-round impacts.”

He adds that the actual numbers will be much smaller than in London, but Edinburgh will feel the impact of these job losses heavily.

The Centre for Economic and Policy Research predicts that the number of job losses in the City of London will be 11,000. With 349,100 people working in the Square Mile, the proportion of redundancies as a total of the workforce is similar in the two capital cities.

Graham Bell, of the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce is quick to point out that the financial services sector wasn’t bracing itself for job cuts, and says job loss predictions are “guess work”.

He says: “It is not helpful to predict job losses because it is all about confidence. If you predict it, it will happen. However, in the present climate, anybody within financial services will be looking at ways to keep profits up, so cutting costs will be almost inevitable.”