Woodcock v Cumbria Primary Care Trust

Article Index
Overview

A redundancy dismissal, the timing of which was motivated to avoid the cost of an enhanced pension if the employee was still employed at the age of 50, was justified age discrimination. While UK age discrimination law doesn’t exclude cost considerations from the justification defence, European case law shows that an employer cannot justify discriminatory treatment solely because the elimination of such treatment would involve increased costs. The Court of Appeal did not provide the hoped-for clarification of the scope of the 'costs plus' issue and employers should certainly not give credence to various misleading press reports suggesting that the Court of Appeal has somehow made it 'easier' to sack older workers to cut costs.
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