With apologies for cross posting
Dear colleagues
Now that we are back in our offices we have had time to look more closely at the draft Employment Equality (Age) regulations. The DTI website is now working and you can access the regulations in full and the associated consultation documents on http://www.dti.gov.uk/er/equality/age.htm
When we wrote to you last week we said that what was unexpected in the draft regulations were the procedures for planned retirement which are being proposed and which have a number of practical implications for HEIs as well as policy implications. That remains true. But at the time we wrote to you we had understood from the Employers Forum on Age Last Chance document http://www.efa.org.uk/publications/downloads/Last_Chance.pdf that the draft regulations, contrary to expectations, did not list specific grounds for objective justification of age discriminatory practice. Now that we have time to read through the regulations, it is worth pointing out that while specific grounds are not actually listed as expected, the draft regulations do actually cite three possible examples of age discriminatory practice that might be considered 'a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim' and those examples would all be of interest to HEIs. They are
- the setting of requirements as to age in order to ensure the protection or promote the vocational integration of people in a particular age group
- the fixing of a minimum age to qualify for certain advantages linked to employment or occupation in order to recruit or retain older people
- the fixing of maximum age for recruitment or promotion which is based on the training requirements of the post in question or the need for a reasonable period in post before retirement.
Despite this little 'blip' between the EFA document and what finally appeared in the regulations, we would recommend you read Last Chance. It is a very quick easy synopsis of the regulations and their implications.
The whole area of objective justification of age discriminatory practice is clearly still somewhat unclear and contested and there are other areas of ambiguity in other parts of the regulations. For those reasons, we would urge you to participate in the consultation which ends on October 17th.
We will be updating the age pages on our website end of next week and then in early September we hope to issue an Update to the regulations which will amongst other things highlight those regulations you may specifically wish to comment on. We will also issue then the overview of the responses to our web based consultation on age.
The first formal meeting of the ECU/UCEA working group on age will take place in late September. We will keep you up to date with the workplans of that group as they develop.
Please do pass this email on to appropriate colleagues in your institution.
Best wishes
Liz Sutherland and Robyn Challis
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