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Employment Law Update

The Default Retirement Age Review

Next year, the government will be reviewing the default retirement age of 65 to determine whether it’s still appropriate and necessary. In light of this, a survey will be carried out, as commissioned by the government itself, to investigate employer’s policies, practices and preferences relating to age.

Additionally, the Department for Work and Pensions and the Department for Business Innovation and Skills are requesting business and individuals to provide evidence to help with the review. In particular, the Government is seeking evidence into the following areas:

• the operation of the default retirement age in practice;
• the reasons that businesses use mandatory retirement ages;
• the impacts on businesses, individuals, and the economy, of raising or removing the default retirement age;
• the experience of businesses operating without a default retirement age;

Submissions are requested by 1 February 2010. More information can be found at the BERR website.

Racial Discrimination when Recruiting

The Department of Work and Pensions has published the results of its research which investigates the extent to which employers discriminate when short listing job applications.

As an experiment, duplicate job applications were sent out, save for one having a traditional white British name and the other having a name considered to be widely associated with ethnic groups.

The findings highlighted that there was discrimination in favour of applicants with white British names over their ethnic minority equivalent, by 29%. The findings will be used to determine whether any changes in discrimination law are required.

Service Related Pay Schemes

A landmark ruling in the Court of Appeal has placed doubt over the widespread practice of rewarding long service, by paying those staff more than they pay staff with shorter service. It has been held that such schemes can be discriminatory against women. Mainly because, linking pay to length of service often disadvantages women, who often don’t have the same continuous length of service as men do - as they take time out to have a family.

This could bring serious implications for a large number of employers, as it’s thought that a third of companies in the UK use pay scales that increase salaries according to length of service. Therefore, schemes which disadvantage women will have to be thoroughly justified by employers, if challenged.

Following the recent landmark judgment by the European Court of Justice, employees who fall ill during their annual leave could now claim back time lost. Under the new terms, employees could even be allowed to carry any annual leave ruined by illness over into the following year.

Leading employment lawyers are warning that this will be costly for businesses and that it left "the door open for abuse" by dishonest employees seeking to boost their holiday entitlement by simply claiming to have a cold or flu while on leave.

In light of this ruling, and the second bout of Swine Flu that’s looming over our workforces, we’ve put together a quick checklist of points to be considered for your working practices – so you can lessen the impact these changes make on your business.