Dear Brother/ Sister
AGE DISCRIMINATION 1992 FPS AND 2006 NFPS
Further to circular 2021HOC0056MR, the latest instalment of the age discrimination litigation was handed down by the Employment Appeal Tribunal (EAT) this morning.
I’m pleased to say that the Fire Brigades Union won, again.
The issue was whether the FRAs are responsible for the age discrimination which everyone now admits occurred when the 2015 Schemes were introduced. The FRAs maintain that they should not be held responsible. According to them they had no choice but to apply the regulations that were put on the statute book by the government in 2015, even if they are discriminatory. They lost this issue in the Employment Tribunal in 2016, the appeals to that decision continued and the specific issue appealed by the FRAs (that they could not be held responsible for age discrimination) was heard at EAT 16 December 2020. The EAT judgement should have been handed down in January 2021 but the FRAs made a late submission that introduced further delay.
The EAT in their decision disagreed with them, and agreed with us. The way the Equality Act 2010 works is that the scheme rules are automatically rewritten if they are discriminatory. The FRAs must give effect to the rules as if the discriminatory provisions were not there.
This may sound quite technical, but it isn’t. The FRAs have refused to deal with cases where members have already retired (or should have been allowed to retire) under the terms of the pre-2015 rules because, they say, they can’t. Well now they know that they can, and they must.
We are starting new court proceedings to make them deal with these cases without waiting for new regulations to be made. We will keep you informed of our progress.
Yours fraternally,
MARK ROWE
National Officer
