Archive for the ‘M&A Issues’ Category

Early retirement pension rights and TUPE – practical problems after Procter & Gamble

Thursday, 7 February 2013

What early retirement pension benefits does an employer need to provide when taking on employees on a business transfer?  And how should the employer provide them? 

Last year the High Court confirmed that enhanced early retirement rights under occupational pension schemes can transfer with the member on a TUPE transfer (Procter & Gamble v SCA).  In July, Mervyn Parry posted about some of the questions left unanswered by this case (Early retirement rights and TUPE – where next?).  These unanswered questions are now turning into real lurking obstacles which employers are finding difficult to navigate.  Here are a couple of examples we’ve seen recently. (more…)

Pensions auto-enrolment and TUPE: they don’t play well together

Wednesday, 11 July 2012

The wrinkles in the pensions automatic enrolment regime are gradually being ironed out.  But with less than six months to go until the first employers reach their compulsory staging date, there are problem areas the DWP has not addressed.  The interaction between auto-enrolment and TUPE is one of them: when auto-enrolled employees are transferred to another company, the auto-enrolment legislation and the TUPE regulations step on each other’s toes. (more…)

Beckmann and Martin pension rights – a recap

Tuesday, 22 November 2011

So-called Beckmann and Martin pension rights are still a bit of a nuisance on transactions when a business is sold out from a company.  On the sale, the employees and their rights transfer under the TUPE regime.  Normally pension rights don’t get dragged along, but the Beckmann and Martin cases suggested that employees’ rights to early retirement or enhancements which are contingent on dismissal – for example on a redundancy exercise following an outsourcing or acquisition, as in Beckmann – would do. The reason is that rights which do not relate to old-age, invalidity or survivors’ benefits, do transfer under the normal TUPE rules. (more…)