Hmmmm…..

Not many business-blogs could get away with an opening like that, but the Seldon
V Clarkson Wright and Jakes saga leaves me in that frame of mind to be
frank. And it may also raise some new issues for employee benefit provision as
well.

Some will recall that the current Government are committed to their ‘Red Tape
Challenge’. As initiative titles go, this may be a poor one, as it sounds
rather more like an appeal from the back of a cereal packet than a legitimate
government initiative.

Yet the idea of the challenge was promising: To drive down the regulation on UK
business to increase efficiency.

It was presumably with this ideal at least partially in mind that a decision to
scrap the Default Retirement Age (DRA) was made last year. Following that
decision it was effectively no longer possible to retire someone purely based
on their age.

As would be expected, this in itself has created more than a few headaches for
some employers.

Likewise it has clouded the employee benefits landscape, as it raises questions about
what age employers should cease their benefits offering. We do have a legal
framework to respond to that question, but this does not necessarily allow for
the additional moral and business implications of such a decision.

But the abolition of the DRA was always more likely to be a saga than a
short-story, and so to the latest chapter is the Seldon case this
week.

For a brief summary of this, here is a link to one of the many articles on the
subject:

https://www.peoplemanagement.co.uk/pm/articles/2012/04/seldon-v-clarkson-wright-and-jakes.htm

So, on balance, it would now appear that the employer may well be able to justify a
compulsory retirement age in some circumstances. How tricky this is to justify,
and how successful this will be in the long term, is one for the legal
fraternity and not for myself.

What is important for this blog is to reinforce that whatever solution and policy
each employer works to, they should make sure that their employee benefit
offering is reviewed in line with that goal. That should extend not just to the
policies in place, but also the communications and employee contracts where
benefits are mentioned as well.

Only by reviewing all the above can the employer be certain/ sure that they have a
joined up policy, and this will hopefully minimise any future issues in this
increasingly tricky area.

This is sure to be a subject that I will return to many times over the coming months
and years.

In the meantime, it’s worth reflecting that, if the abolition of the DRA is
anything to go by, ‘simplification’ of the rule-book may indeed be a
significant ‘challenge’!

Best regards

Steve