Re: Retirement 'wind-down'

Looking for employment advice here.

> >Situation: > >Mother's friend's husband (bit convoluted, sorry) works in an import/export >department of a medium sized company. His job involves a huge amount of >travel (US and far East mostly) and his pay reflects this with a load of >overtime, travelling time, bonuses etc. >He is going to retire in late 2008 on a final salary pension. >He has been told that from Feb he is to be based 100% in the UK, this will >severely reduce his income in the final two years of his working life. >Co-incidentally the same 2 years that his final salary is averaged over to >determine his pension. > >His HR dept call this a 'retirement wind-down' to allow him to repare for >retirement. He reckons it is designed to hack his pension by almost a third >by reducing his final years of income. >Nobody else he knows of in the company has been given a wind-down like this. > >He is not a member of a union and has decided to consult a lawyer, he asked >me to post the question here to get some preliminary advice. > >Thanks > >Andy >

Crossposted to uk.finance.

I've no idea whether they can get away with this.

Consider solicitors with financial advice training , search on the list of awards for lawyers involved in pensions work -

The ACAS helpline might be a good place to start. Link on my webpage

Daytona

Reply to
Daytona
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It might be worthwhile to talk directly to the administrators of the pension scheme first. This situation is not that uncommon and they sometimes have work-arounds (such as averaging the salary over a longer period). If that fails, try the pension scheme trustees directly.

Reply to
tkd

There are two ways of looking at this. One is what he/you are doing, namely that it's outrageous to lower his salary artificially in order to lower his pension. In extremis this effective demotion could be construed as tantamount to contructive dismissal. It would seem to make for a good case for legal action.

The other, however, is that expenses, overtime and bonuses are unlikely to count as pensionable salary anyway, so even if he were to carry on globetrotting until R-day, his pension would not end up any higher anyway, than by doing what they propose to do. It's as well to check this. If it is a contributory scheme, he can check his pay slips to see whether any pay deductions in respect of superannuation or pension contributions are based on the contract percentage of basic salary or of actual pay including any extras. It could all be much ado about nothing.

Reply to
Ronald Raygun

This is my understanding too. The whole point of bonuses is that they don't contribute to final salary pensions so employers prefer bonuses to pay rises. Looking on the black side, he may have been stiched up years ago. rusty

Reply to
rusty

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