Remedies for part-timers excluded from pension schemes, revisited (News, 15 November 2011)

Article summary

Where female employees have, by virtue of their part-time status, been unlawfully excluded from a voluntary occupational pension scheme, and the employer subsequently changes the rules to allow them to join it, (1) such women who, the tribunal finds, would not have opted into the pension scheme, even had they been entitled to do so, will not be entitled to any remedy because they have suffered no loss, and that lack of remedy is compatible with EU law, (2) the fact that a woman does not join a scheme as soon as she becomes entitled to do so may be powerful evidence leading a tribunal to infer that she would not have joined it earlier, but this should not be presumed and, instead, all the evidence bearing on the question whether she would have joined earlier must be considered, (3) the declaratory remedy of entitlement to membership of the scheme should not, generally, be extended to cover periods (a) after...