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I've been getting conflicting reports. What's the state of the law? Do employment contracts no longer include a retirement date?
Mandatory retirement has gone. See, for example, Bristol's page on the subject:
The phrase to google is "default retirement age". And this has indeed gone. You cannot retire someone merely because he or she has reached a particular age. There is a bit of information here:
http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?itemId=1082249873&type=RESOURCES
You can, however, retire people at a given age in pursuit of a legitimate business aim. What that means will doubtless have to be decided in the courts, but here is a note of one case. This case may however be atypical because it concerned a partner rather than an employee, and I suspect that it is easier to argue the need for succession planning where partners are concerned:
Whoops, having posted, I found on testing the legalweek.com link that it only works when the page is found via Google. If you click on it, you will be taken to a paywall. So here is a link to another article on the same case:
The Seldon case to which Richard Baron adverts was decided under the previous law (2006 regulations) rather than under the 2010 Equality Act, which — through an amendment in 2011 — eliminates the default retirement age. Hence, the relevance of the Seldon case to future litigation is rather limited. However, as Richard says, employers are still allowed to retain a default retirement age it it is a "proportional means" for the achievement of a "legitimate end." Both Oxford and Cambridge are seeking to retain a default retirement age by invoking those phrases in the Equality Act. Those two universities will therefore be facing litigation.
Matt's comments are correct. Still, it seems likely that they will follow Seldon in giving employers a fairly wide berth on 'legitimate end' and reserve more serious scrutiny for the proportionality phase. Oxford's scattergun 'justification' is below. Offhand, I can't imagine some of these surviving any scrutiny at all (eg the University's desire to be able to manage retirement planning, or to avoid 'invidious performance management' procedures).
http://www.admin.ox.ac.uk/personnel/end/retirement/acrelretire/ejraaim/
It's understood, isn't it, that ending mandatory retirement is another blow for inequality?
In philosophy, fewer people will get jobs because, with longer average careers, there will be fewer replacements hired each year. But those who do get jobs will do better financially from them, because they'll have more years earning a high salary.
As always, the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer.
When the elimination of the default retirement age in the UK was discussed on this blog ten months ago, Tom Hurka raised the same point that he has raised above. I replied then to his earlier comment. Instead of reiterating my reply here, I'll refer any interested readers to the (fairly short) earlier thread:
Wow, I didn't know that about Oxbridge. I'm pretty sure that most other universities have simply abolished the mandatory retirement age, as Bristol have done. It'll be interesting to see whether they (Oxbridge) manage to get away with it; if they do, I imagine others will try to follow suit. My guess, though, is that most people who are still research-active won't stay on much past 65 because they'll actually get the time to do some research and we have a pretty decent pension scheme (though new people coming through now get a much worse one, as of this year). And those who aren't research-active will be, um, persuaded to retire by the prospect of heavy teaching and admin loads if they stay on. Like I say, just a guess …
As a practical matter, will academics at oxbridge who are according to their universities policies set to retire this year, be forced to retire, or is there some kind of injunction against these policies, or what?
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