Consultation Closed On Draft Legislation To Outlaw Age Discrimination
The Government consulted on proposals to legislate on age discrimination in "Coming of Age". The consultation ended on 17 October. Subject to Parliamentary approval the legislation will come into force on 1 October 2006. Carol Bates commented, "The new legislation will raise significant issues about non discrimination against older and younger members of the workforce. In many ways, it will be quite unlike any other form of anti-discrimination legislation we have yet seen. After all, we are all of us at some time younger, and destined to be older members of the workforce, so judging the category of people who are potentially the subject of discrimination will raise new challenges. HR professionals will have to review their recruitment tools such as application forms and policy statements to ensure that they are in line with the ethos of the new legislation. The regulations will raise important issues in terms of the skills demanded in managing an older workforce, and organisations should be thinking about this now."
The draft regulations:
- prohibit unjustified age discrimination in employment and vocational training
- require employers who set their retirement age below the default age of 65 to justify or change it
- introduce a new duty on employers to consider an employee's request to continue working beyond retirement
- require employers to inform employees in writing, and at least 6 months in advance, of their intended retirement date. This will allow people to plan for their retirement
- remove the upper age limit for unfair dismissal and redundancy rights, giving older workers the same rights to claim unfair dismissal or receive a redundancy payment as younger workers, unless there is a genuine retirement
- include provisions relating to service related benefits and occupational pensions
The regulations also remove the age limits for Statutory Sick Pay, Statutory Maternity Pay, Statutory Adoption Pay and Statutory Paternity Pay. The DTI say they continue to take steps to gauge stakeholder opinion on changes to the method of calculation of statutory redundancy payments. At present there is a lower scale of payment for those below the age of 41 and a tapering down of statutory payments in the last year before the 65th birthday. This is by definition discriminatory. It will be interesting to see what solution results.
Further information: See the Consultation Document "Equality and Diversity: Coming of Age": http://www.dti.gov.uk/er/equality/consultation_doc_2006.pdf (will open in a new window)
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1 December 2005
