Excellent experience start to finish – always very responsive to any queries and the turnaround on the property I was buying was very quick, even in the busy time leading up to stamp duty deadline. Jenny was always very helpful and went above and beyond to close on a short timescale.
Employment Equality (Repeal of Retirement Age) Regulations
The long awaited draft Regulations dealing with the removal of the Default Retirement Age with effect from 1 October 2011 have finally been released by the Government. In brief, the Regulations deal with the following:
- The current legislation which makes a retirement dismissal fair providing that the correct procedure has been followed, will be abolished from 6 April 2011.
- The final date for issuing a notice of retirement under the current regime is therefore 5 April 2011.
- The draft Regulations confirm that an exemption will be provided to enable employers to avoid providing insurance benefits to the over 65s.
The anomaly contained in the first draft of the regulations has been corrected by a second draft set of regulations, which confirm that employees can be lawfully retired provided that notice of intention to retire is given before 5 April 2011, and the employee has attained, or will attain, the age of 65 by 30 September 2011. The draft regulations also provide a stop date of 5 January 2012 for an employee to exercise their right to request working beyond retirement, enabling an employee who is given 12 months’ notice of intended retirement on 5th April 2011 to exercise their right to request working beyond their intended retirement date.
The final version of the regulations is expected to be published shortly, and we will provide a further update at that time.
Right to Request Time Off for Training
Since April 2010, the employees of organisations with more than 250 staff have had the right to request time off to undertake training. This right was due to be extended to all employees with effect from 6 April 2011. Following a consultation, the government have announced that this will be delayed, in order that further consideration can be given to the impact which the changes would have upon smaller businesses.
