In this guide, we’ll cover the retirement age for men and women, state pension requirements and early retirement rules, including for ill health.
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Navigating the Transition from Work to Retirement
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HR management outsourcing is when a team of experts manage your HR by looking after your contracts, policies, and procedures.
These are the HR essentials every business needs. Without them, your staff could bring successful claims against you, you could lose thousands in legal fines, and even face prosecution. Never underestimate the benefits of HR support for a small business.
We have years of experience in providing HR for SMEs and HR management outsourcing. Contact us to see how we can support you, including HR advice for small businesses - as well as medium and large companies.
Good human resource management is having round the clock support when you need it the most.
Whenever there’s a staff challenge or an important legal update, you just pick up the phone and get the help you need – no matter the time or place.
The main benefits of HR outsourcing are:
- Cost saving: Reduces the expenses for such things are hiring, training and employing an in-house HR team.
- Time saving: Saves time for staff members away from HR tasks.
- Improves expertise and compliance: Provides ongoing advice and support to ensure complete and total compliance.
- Reduces risk: Reduces the risk of any payroll and compliance failures.
Outsourcing HR is cheaper than hiring internal staff and saves you money overall when it comes to your HR service. Plus, you avoid making mistakes that could cost you heavily in claims and legal fines down the line. Every business should consider HR support as a way to avoid claims.
Peninsula is one of the leading HR outsourcing services in the UK, and by working with us you get access to our HR advisory service. Contact us for your outsourced SME HR today.
The key functions of HR outsourcing services are:
- Payroll and benefits: Helps a business to manage employee wages, tax processing, and employee enrolment.
- Recruitment and onboarding: Helps with job descriptions, sourcing new candidates, interviewing, and ensuring a smooth onboarding process.
- Compliance with employment law: Helps to ensure compliance with ever-changing employment legislation.
- Employee relations: Helps to manage grievance and disciplinary procedures, and any ongoing support that's required.
- HR admin: Helps to handle and manage daily tasks, such as employee records, sorting employment contracts, and processing any leave requests.
- Training and development: Helps to create and deliver staff training programs to improve employees' skills.
As an employer, it's unavoidable that employees will leave your business. But a leaving employee can provide you with honest, crucial, and valuable feedback.
In this guide, we'll look at how to deal with an angry ex-employee, the problems they can cause and how to protect yourself to avoid the risk.
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End of Employment
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Many of your employee’s won’t work for you for their entire career. But at some point, a member of staff will retire.
And so it’s important to know what to do when that happens.
In this guide, we’ll cover the retirement age for men and women, state pension requirements and early retirement rules including for ill health.
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There is no set retirement age in the UK. Workers used to be forced to stop working at 65, this was known as the ‘default retirement age’.
This was scrapped in 2011, following a campaign by Age UK.
Some jobs still carry a compulsory end of employment, such as the fire service. This is because of the physical demand of certain jobs. It’s age discrimination to force someone to retire for any reason other than capability.
Because of this, when people talk about the retirement age, they usually mean the state pension age.
At what age can you claim a state pension in the UK?
The state pension retirement age is when you’re eligible to receive a pension from the government. The pension retirement age depends on when you were born.
As life expectancy has increased, so has the age at which you can .
When first introduced in 1948, the men’s retirement age in the UK was 65. The state retirement age for women was 60. The government brought this in line with the men’s rate in March 2010, when both were increased to 66.
This government has announced plans to increase the pension age again.
For anyone born on or before 5th April 1970, the pension age won’t be any change. They’ll be eligible to claim a state pension on their 66th birthday.
Anyone born between 6 April 1970 and 5 April 1978, the pension age is currently 67 but could rise to between 67 years and one month, and 68 years, depending on birth date.
For anyone born after 6 April 1978, the pension age is 68.
The rules on when an employee can draw a pension will differ for workplace or personal pension schemes. They usually let you take a pension earlier than the state pension.
There are many reasons someone might decide to retire early. However, doing so will affect their state pension allowance.
Taking early retirement means they won’t accrue as much in their pension pot and the money will have to go further. This will affect both state pension and any personal pension funds’
The minimum retirement age in the UK for most pension plans is currently 55. However, the government intends to increase this to age 57 on 6 April 2028.
Sometimes where an employee cannot work anymore, they can claim retirement before age 55. This is known as ill health retirement or being medically retired.
Ill health retirement
Ill health retirement can cover an employee if they are unable to work or their ability to earn has been impacted by and disability.
This type of retirement can cover conditions, and different pension schemes will have different criteria. Generally, they need to show that:
They’re permanently unable to complete their role because of their condition.
There are no further medical treatments available.
They have explored all reasonable adjustments to enable a return to work.
If they’re unable to return to their role, an you may offer an alternative such as working fewer hours or a different role. In this event, they can still claim ill health.
As with choosing to stop working early, ill health only applies to personal pension schemes. They won’t receive a state pension before reaching state pension age.
Expert support on end of employment with Peninsula
There’s a lot to think about when leaving a job, and even more to consider when retiring.
From the different pension scheme requirements, the changing ages at which you can retire and not to mention handing over your workplace responsibilities.
Peninsula clients get access to our 24/7 HR advice line, meaning you can get answers to all of your urgent retirement queries for yourself or your staff.
And if you’re not yet a client, you can still enjoy a free advice call from one of our business experts. Simply call us on 0800 028 2420.
Award-winning services
Take the first step towards a safer business. Answer a few questions about your HR and Health & Safety management and we’ll direct you to the support you need
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