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This week in HR
A round-up of the top HR and management stories
Week ending Friday 4 March 2011
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Government clears up
confusion over DRA LINKS
The government has amended  Draft regulations move goalposts on DRA abolition
controversial draft regulations People Management bit.ly/eSIgTA
governing the end of the default
retirement age (DRA), after employers
and legal experts had voiced concerns
about its impact.
The initial draft regulations laid before
Parliament last month said that only
people who would turn 65 between
6 April and 30 September of this year
could be forcibly retired, suggesting that those aged 65 or over before 6
April were already protected. However, the draft has now been revised to
confirm that employers can lawfully retire any employee who is already 65
or will turn 65 on or before 30 September 2011.
Read the full story at bit.ly/hVKYdl
Report calls for shake-up of vocational education  Review of vocational education - The Wolf Report
Read the full story at bit.ly/fiZBPe bit.ly/exi1MF
The government should give more funding to employer-led apprenticeships
and training and take it away from vocational qualifications that offer nothing
to the employability of young people, a report has recommended. The Wolf
Report criticised the system of vocational education for having “perverse
incentives” which steer colleges and learners into qualifications that “have
little or no value”.
Police to face pay cuts, warns home secretary  Police pay review
Read the full story at bit.ly/g325EZ www.police-information.co.uk/policepay.htm
Cuts to police pay are “unavoidable” if further job losses in the country’s forces
are to be averted, according to the home secretary, Theresa May. In order to
protect front-line services but give taxpayers a “fair deal”, the policing bill
must be reduced, she told a meeting of chief constables. Three-quarters of the
police budget – £11 billion – is spent on pay, and the government is planning to
cut its funding for forces by 20 per cent by 2015.
Civil service recruitment freeze extended  Sir Gus O’Donnell: Job applicants swamp civil service
Read the full story at bit.ly/eqwOWt BBC http://bbc.in/eiOqR3
The government has announced an extension to the temporary recruitment
freeze for the civil service that was put in place last May. Restrictions on filling
empty posts, originally set to end with the 2010/11 financial year, will now
continue subject to an ongoing review, potentially lasting until the end of the
spending review period in 2015. Extending the block on hiring is part of
broader efforts to curb spending and save an additional £3 billion by the end of
this financial year, Cabinet Office minister Francis Maude said.
ECJ decision on insurance hits pension annuities  Equality Act 2010 - what it means for HR
Read the full story at bit.ly/hSkwJH People Management bit.ly/igAx1Y
A European Court of Justice (ECJ) decision on gender discrimination in the
pricing of insurance will be detrimental to people’s pension income in
retirement, experts say. The insurance industry has traditionally used the
assumption that women live longer than men to inform the size of annuity
that people can buy with their pension savings when they retire. But this
practice has been ruled discriminatory by the court, which also rejected the ☛ MORE NEWS ON NEXT PAGE
practice of pricing car insurance according to gender risk factors.

2. ☛ PEOPLE MANAGEMENT ‘THIS WEEK IN HR’ CONTINUED...
LINKS
Comment: Accountability can get women on boards  Equality Act 2010 - what it means for HR
Read the full story at bit.ly/dXuSMJ People Management bit.ly/igAx1Y
Responding to the Davies report, Fiona Cannon, diversity and inclusion
director of Lloyds Banking Group, says that active sponsorship of potential
female leaders, together with making firms accountable for their gender
balance, are the ways to get more women into top positions.
Comment: Managing an age-diverse workforce  Legislative timetable – what’s new in the law
Read the full story at bit.ly/ek3bu1 People Management bit.ly/eZwGXm
Duncan Brown writes that the abolition of the default retirement age will
require much more of employers than merely complying with legislation –
they will have to get better at workforce planning, communication and
performance management.
GSK to pay tuition fees for graduate recruits  KPMG offers to pay school leavers’ tuition fees
Read the full story at bit.ly/dOUUFE People Management bit.ly/ejulWZ
GlaxoSmithKline (GSK) has pledged to
reimburse the full tuition fees of its future
graduate trainees, in response to next year’s
tripling of university charges. The initiative
could cost the pharmaceutical giant up to
£3 million per year, as it recruits between
50 and 100 graduates annually, who will
have paid as much as £27,000 each in
uncapped tuition fees from 2012. Payments to reimburse the cost of tuition fees
will be made once recruits have entered full employment, and on the
condition they remain with GSK for two years.
HSBC reveals numbers of top earning staff  HSBC becomes first bank to detail pay for top earners pay
Read the full story at bit.ly/fc3Y6a The Telegraph bit.ly/eozaWM
HSBC has published revealing data for the earnings of its top executives under new
disclosure rules imposed in Hong Kong. The bank reported that globally more than
250 of its staff earn more than £1 million, while more than a third of staff (89)
taking home this amount were based in the UK. Globally, the five highest paid
individuals earned a combined £34.3 million including pensions and bonuses.
Report casts doubt on shared services savings  Shared Necessities: The next generation of shared services
Read the full story at bit.ly/ig7wiY New Local Government Network bit.ly/esT8ME
Councils planning to share back-office services, including HR, to achieve large
budget cuts have been challenged by a report that suggests savings will be as
little as 3.6 per cent. The report, Shared Necessities: the next generation of
shared services, said that even if back-office shared services achieved
“maximum efficiency”, savings would only amount to 3.6 per cent. It added
that a more realistic figure for potential savings was half that, or 1.8 per cent.
Pfizer leaders challenged over site closure  Cameron kept in dark over Pfizer closure
Read the full story at bit.ly/hNaGrw Financial Times http://on.ft.com/g4fidN
Pfizer’s top executives have been forced to defend to MPs the pharmaceutical
company’s decision to shut its research and development site in Sandwich.
At a meeting of the Science and Technology Committee on Monday, MPs
raised concerns about the government’s late notification of the move and a
lack of alternative options to the Kent closure, which will cost up to 2,400
jobs. But bosses denied claims that severance pay for those affected by the
closure was being cut from its current level. Standard severance pay would
remain at three-and-a half weeks per year of service, although an employee
consultation about the redundancies was still ongoing.
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