Age discrimination ' is your business ready? By Rebecca Benneyworth

Regarding Mike's comment, the notes from a recent course I went on covering age discrimination state that the regulations cover all workers, including inter alia agency workers and contract workers.

Regarding Michael Dunsmore's comments, I am puzzled dhat he should think that a general news and journalistic organisation should have greater credibility than Rebecca B! Her comments are directly in agreement with, again, the comments/notes from the course (no, it was not Rebecca's course!).

Finally, again on Michael's comments on Neil's, while on an individual level many civil and public servants do their utmost and work fantastically hard etc (viz. those dying in the middle east etc), as a body one wishes the civil service would just serve us better. I rather agree with Neil's phrase "those ..... in Parliament". There seems to be no conception at all of the sheer impracticability of proper compliance, at least at the small business end of the market, with all these regulations (in addition to increasingly subjective (tax) law). There really needs to be a reality check!

None of the news items has seen fit to note that since the legislation deals with employees, it does not apply to contract / temp staff.

Unless someone knows better ...?

More bumbling bureacracy dreamed up by eejits in civil service jobs (with big fat pension prospects thanks to the real taxpayers).

Who in their right mind would want to open a business in the disgustingly over-regulated UK and Europe??? Increased legislation pours out daily and unless you are a significant FTSE player you don't have the resources to absorb all the bullgarbage legislation (local, regional, national and Brussels) and interpret it for internal implementation.

Of course the mindless dummies in govt. (local, regional, national and Brussels) have their jobs-for-life (& risk-free pensions) to keep them in endless bread-and-butter, pouring out futile commandments (achtung!) in order to justify meaningless roles. They will only be bitten once all the real taxpayers and corporates have all been made redundant due to company liquidations and moves abroad and there's no-one left steal off to fund their miserable tax-thieving wages.

Bloated officialdom has never rescued or contibuted to a country's economy! When do the fools in parlaiment ever get around to realising this?

Only when its too damned late....as usual!!

The BBC has an age discrimination quiz at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/5381300.stm

The results of this quiz show that:
(i) It is lawful for an employer to ask for your date of birth on a job application form.
(ii) It is lawful for your employer to tell you that, under the new law, you are free to request to stay on beyond age 65 but there is no point as they always say no. (Always saying 'no' would imply that the employer had not fulfilled his obligation to consider the requests)

This is not compatible with Rebecca's article, which does indicate the current confusion over the application of the regulations.

On a separate topic: As a former (scientific) civil servant, I object to Neil P-M's childish and insulting comments on civil servants. They do not comply with AccountingWEB's standards for posting comments. Perhaps he is not aware of the exceptionally wide range of tasks undertaken by civil servants nor that the calculations of their pay rates have included notional contributions for their pensions.