Claiming redundancy money and ill health pension?

zaksmum

Hubby had worked for his company for 40 years. Last year the company wanted to TUPE the workforce over to another company. They emphasised that contract terms would be protected...unless technical, economic, or organisational reasons cropped up. During the consultation period, however, the TUPE was scrapped and the workers were to remain with the original company.

The problem was that the company was by then using agency workers and didn't want to have to honour the much better contracts of the older workers who'd been there for so many years.

They offered voluntary redundancy with a 25K package to anyone who wanted to go.

Hubby had struggled to go to work for some years due to increasing ill health and decided to apply for his occupational ill health pension at that time.

After three compulsory medicals he was approved for the ill health pension and asked his HR manager if he could also take the 25K package.

The HR guy said no, you can't take the package AND your ill health pension as the pension included a lump sum payment, making the redundancy package inapplicable in this case.

So hubby accepted this and just took his pension without the redundancy package.

Now a friend of his is saying he should have got the redundancy package after his 40 years service, and the ill health pension was nothing to do with the redundancy but a separate financial arrangement he'd paid into since 1969.

He wouldn't like to think he'd been done out of 25K, and he ended up leaving without anything from the company...so who's right?

Emmzi

he is either being made redundant and leaving that way, OR being ill health retired and leaving that way. It's one or the other.

Your hubby has not lost out - please don't worry that he has. It seems fair to me (HR bod)

zaksmum

Emmzi wrote: »

he is either being made redundant and leaving that way, OR being ill health retired and leaving that way. It's one or the other.

Your hubby has not lost out - please don't worry that he has. It seems fair to me (HR bod)

thanks for that emmzi

zzzLazyDaisy

You can only have one reason for termination of employment.

If the reason for termination was redundancy, he'd get the redundancy payment.

If he elected to take early retirement on health grounds, he would get his ill-health retirement pension (but in that case he wouldn't be being made redundant).

I can understand you asking the question, as you certainly don't want to lose out on that sort of money - but in this case it is just a misunderstanding, and he wasn't entitled to a redundancy payment.