LONDON BRIEFING:SHOULD DISGRACED bankers be given a second chance? Or should they be made to pay for their sins for the rest of their lives – or at least until memories of the great banking collapse have faded, many years from now?

The 1,660 Cheltenham Gloucester (CG) employees whose jobs have just been axed are not in a forgiving frame of mind. And understandably so, having learnt yesterday, mostly through media reports, that Lloyds Banking Group is to close CG’s entire 164-branch network.

By November, the 160-year-old CG name will have disappeared from the UK high street.

CG staff join the thousands of bank workers who have lost their jobs since the financial crisis began. Government bailouts may have stopped the banks going bust, but they have not prevented the mounting toll of job losses in the industry. Lloyds alone has announced cuts of 5,000 in recent weeks and there is little doubt there will be many more.

For most of the redundant workers, the chances of finding employment during a recession, and in an industry that is on its knees, are virtually non-existent. So it’s not hard to guess their reaction to the news that one of the architects of the banking crisis has just walked into one of the biggest jobs in British retailing.

Andy Hornby, former chief executive of Halifax Bank of Scotland (HBOS), is to take up his new role as chief executive of Alliance Boots, the drugs wholesaler and retail pharmacy group, at the start of next month, on a pay and performance package reckoned to be worth about £1 million (€1.16 million) a year.

Hornby’s appointment comes just a few months after he squirmed alongside former Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS) boss Sir Fred Goodwin at the House of Commons, as MPs on the Treasury select committee blasted them for their role in the crisis.

The rapid rehabilitation of the former HBOS boss has sparked outrage, not only among unions and unemployed bank workers but also ordinary taxpayers and shareholders. But what is the alternative? Hornby is 42 and has at least 20 working years ahead of him. Should he be banned from holding a senior job, relegated by some new “disgraced bankers law” to stacking shelves or sweeping the streets?

Hornby left a glittering career in retailing 10 years ago to join Halifax. Educated at Oxford and Harvard, he earned his spurs in the Wal-Mart school of retailing, having held senior jobs at Asda, its UK supermarket arm.

Dismissed initially as “a grocer who happens to run a bank”, Hornby took to banking in a big way and became well-regarded by his peers. In 2006, he was rewarded with the top job at the enlarged HBOS group when Sir James Crosby, another member of the disgraced bankers’ club, stepped aside early.

Supporters of Hornby say Crosby should shoulder most of the blame for what went on at HBOS, now part of Lloyds Banking Group after the disastrous government-brokered rescue takeover. But Hornby was head of the bank’s retail division for several years – when its lending was far from prudent – and he had ample time to steer it back once he took the top job.

So Hornby is not blameless, but neither is he a “Fred the Shred”. Unlike the reviled former RBS boss, he waived his entitlement to a £1 million payoff when he quit and gave up his additional pension entitlement. During his career at HBOS he took his bonuses in shares rather than cash. He also had the decency to accept the blame for what happened, rather than offload it on his predecessor, no matter how justified that might have been.

But the real reason Hornby has been able to re-enter the corporate world so swiftly is that he has skills an employer is prepared to pay for; not as a banker, but as a retailer.

Hornby is thought to have had a couple of job offers but it is fitting that it should be Alliance Boots coming to his rescue – it was a job offer from the retailer in 2003 that persuaded HBOS to lock him in with a golden handcuff deal, ultimately giving him the top job at the bank.

Fiona Walsh writes for the Guardiannewspaper in London