Have we seen the back of hefty Scottish financial services redundancies?

Scotland's continued spiralling unemployment, in contrast with the rest of the UK, has largely been laid at the feet of the country's financial services sector. But is it safe to say the situation is beginning to pick up?

Grim figures indeed released by the Office of National Statistics showed that 16,000 jobs have been lost north of the border in the past three months. Unemployment in the UK as a whole fell by 33,000.

The Scottish government also revealed that 6,800 jobs have been lost within nationalised banks over the last year.

David Bell, professor of economics at Stirling University says he was "quite amazed by the numbers" and that a big fall in public sector employment can be explained by job losses at HBOS and RBS.

The Ernst & Young Scottish Item Club has also been decidedly gloomy about its predictions for redundancies in the financial sector, but its forecast for as many as 10,000 job losses has yet to materialise.

Dougie Adams, adviser to the Scottish Item Club, says mass redundancies within the banking sector appear unlikely in 2010.

"It's easy to point the finger at financial services for these unemployment figures, but significant redundancy announcements appear to be largely behind us," he says. "That said, I suspect there's an ongoing drip-drip approach to redundancies within the financial sector."

But, there are also some signs that banks in Scotland have an appetite to recruit again, suggests Mark Wilson, managing consultant at Hudson in Edinburgh.

"Contract recruitment has stayed consistently high, but now we're seeing an uplift in permanent roles within the banking sector," he says. "Obviously, it's easy to get carried away by going from virtually nothing to some seeing some positive signs, but the number of requests for permanent positions is reasonably healthy again."