Redundancy

The joint TUC and Chartered Institute of Personnel Development (CIPD) guide Managing age highlights the following key messages with regard to older workers and redundancy:

• when making redundancies, take care not to use age and length of service as a single selection criterion;

• avoid encouraging early retirement as a way of dealing with job attrition. In losing older employees, you may lose experience and tacit knowledge that are essential for your business;

• enhanced pension entitlements for early retirement are exempt from the age discrimination challenge, but only for existing and prospective members. Early retirement pension enhancement for new joiners needs to be objectively justified;

• you can use age or length of service to calculate redundancy payments, but you must make sure that your method of calculation complies with the law;

• age bars for statutory redundancy have been lifted. Therefore you cannot exclude people who are under 18 or over 64.