What does the new Age Discrimination Act mean?

From 1st October 2006 the Employment Equality (Age) Regulations make it unlawful to discriminate against employees, job seekers and trainees on the basis of their age, whether young or old. This is good news as it will give employees more rights and opportunities at work. The protection covers direct and indirect discrimination, harassment and victimization.

In addition the new legislation gives all employees the right to "request to work" beyond the retirement age set by the company. This will not affect the age at which people can claim their state pension. The legislation provides a national default retirement age of 65, which means that complusory retirement under the age of 65 will be deemed unlawful unless the employer is able to objectively justify the early retirement.

This extra protection for more mature workers includes the opportunity to enforce the legislation by way of an employment tribunal and therefore upper age limits in respect of claims for unfair dismissal and redundancy were removed from 1st October.

What are we doing at CDL to adhere to the regulations?

Well, we do not include dates of birth or age indicators on CV's which are sent to our clients and in fact have not done so for some time. Neither do we list qualifications with dates of study. We do not advertise positions with age limits and do not discriminate in any way on the basis of age during the process of obtaining applications, considering CV's and in obtaining interviews and work placements for those candidates who are registered with us.

We short list candidates on the basis of whether their qualifications and experience meet with our client's specification. We also look for a consistent work history and no regular "job hopping" without good reason and that salary expectations are consistent with the salary band for the position under consideration.

Phrases like 'applicants should be 25-35 years of age', ‘young graduates’, ‘mature person’ are discriminatory.

We strive to publicise our vacancies in ways most likely to attract people of a variety of ages, including internet and legal publications. We should stress that we have always had a policy of equal opportunities for our candidates and where firms we work with are found to have contrary policies, we discontinue our association with them. That said, reassuringly, we are beginning to see clients confirming their equal ops' policies and checking our policy in this respect.

It appears that despite the impending enforcement date for the anti-age discrimination rules, law firms and in-house are widely continuing to categorise their positions in relation to post qualifying experience and whilst this might be seen as disadvantaging younger Solicitors, it has been a method of narrowing the search for suitably experienced people for the level of role available.

However, we always take account of the experience our candidate has, rather than a cursory glance at their PQE and would always introduce a candidate whom we consider to have had the relevant experience and exposure to enable them to fulfil the client's requirements. We consider the quality and relevance of experience to be the most important factor - not the number of years of PQE. We know that experience can vary considerably; simply as a result of the type of firm, infrastructure, amount of delegation/responsibility and quality of work dealt with.

We do keep details of date of birth for our records but this information is retained in order to enable us to undertake diversity monitoring.

We work to good practice and have a written Equal Opportunities Policy, which all or staff adhere to and benefit from. We strive for a workforce which is age diverse and to place candidates in firms on the same basis. We seek applications for vacancies from all age groups. We strive to ensure that the vacancies we advertise are objective, being based solely on skills, relevant experience and capacity to do the job.

We hope that you do not need to rely on the legislation in the future but it is certainly worth knowing your rights and encouraging employers, agencies and others to be open minded and non-discriminatory in respect of age. With an ageing population, employers will have serious recruitment problems in the future if they do discriminate.

ILEX Bristol and Surrounds Annual Summer Ball

Deborah Saw and Caroline Evans at the presentation of the Carpe Diem Legal Awards.

We were delighted to present the Carpe Diem Legal Annual Achievement award to two ILEX students who have completed the Level 3 and Level 6 awards respectively, gaining the highest marks of all students in the Bristol and Surrounds catchment for the 2007 academic year.

Top table and speaker, Chairman of the Bristol ILEX branch, Sarah Cleave

The Level 3 award winner was Debbie Vizor and the Level 6 winner and exceptionally, the Level 3 winner from last year,was Clare Carolan.

Congratulations to the winners and thank you to ILEX for an enjoyable evening.

Pictured with the winners are Tom Corrigan, Partner of law firm Beachcrofts, Judith Gordon-Nichols, ILEX Deputy Vice President and outgoing ILEX President, Mrs Lesley Graham

FUN ON THE FARM!

LISA AND DAVE HAVE BEEN RUNNING THE CHERRY LODGE FARM, FRAMPTON COTTERELL, NEAR BRISTOL FOR ABOUT THE LAST 18 MONTHS AND WELCOME VISITORS TO THE FARM AND THE FARM SHOP, WHICH IS OPEN ON THURSDAY, FRIDAY AND SATURDAY, WEEKLY.

They also cater for group visits - as can be seen by the photographs of Frenchay Playgroup children, who enjoyed seeing and handling the animals, watched Ian make sausages from the farm's own pork and had a lovely picnic afterwards. Contact details and directions will be posted shortly.

The farm has the Gloucester Old Spot Pig, Chickens (for eggs and table meat), Lamb and Ducks and the shop stocks whole lamb and pig, cuts of meat, quiches, sausages, faggots, scotch eggs and free range eggs. You can also buy live ducks and chickens to keep in your garden, allotment or small holding!

Thank you Lisa and Dave for a fantastically informative and fun day for all concerned - and for supplying our lovely girls (Bonnie, Clarrissa, Sasha and Charlotte) who are busy in the coop, laying eggs daily for the CDL breakfast!

AND a couple of our ladies - including the sun bathing hen!

Congratulations to Richard Childs winner of the Endangered Species Group and overall winner of the David Shepherd Wildlife Artist of the Year 2008!

We were already showing the winning drawing, yes drawing!, on our website and are fantastically proud of Richard, who has now won well deserved recognition from a celebrated artist and a few quid for his efforts too!

Go Rich! Want to see how he did it and what else Richard is up to? - Click on his button on our site.

HOLIDAY ENTITLEMENT

DID YOU KNOW......

that your statutory holiday entitlement increased in October to 4.8 weeks per year for a full time worker. This means that you are entitled to 24 days paid holiday per year BUT this allowance can include public/bank holidays, of which there are currently 8 for Great Britain and 10 for Northern Ireland.

The holiday allowance will increase further to 5.6 weeks from 1 April 2009.

Part-time workers are are entitled to the same level of holiday but on a pro rata basis (so 4.8 then 5.6 times your usual working week).

Worth knowing is that you start accruing holiday time as soon as you start work. Your employer CAN control when you take your holiday and you will receive your normal pay for your holiday. When you finish a job you will be paid for any holiday you have not taken.

Also worth knowing is that there is no statutory right to be paid for bank and public holidays. If you decide to work on a bank or public holiday, there is no automatic right to an enhanced pay rate. What you get paid depends on your contract of employment.

Do you know what you should be paid?

The minimum wage is on the rise once again.

From 1st October 2008 those over the age of 22 can expect to earn a minimum of £5.73 per hour, currently £5.52. And 18-21 year olds will also benefit from a slight increase from £4.60 to £4.77. 16-17 year olds must be paid £3.53 per hour from October - their current minimum rate is £3.40.

Brains for brass!

Julie Peasegood asking all the right questions! Roy Winters & Terry Longden talk tactics Magic Magician puzzles Deb!

Carpe Diem Legal were sponsors of the second Brain Game event to be held in Bristol and are thrilled to be able to report that the funds raised on the evening were double that of £30,000 raised in 2007.

The evening was hosted by actress and author, Julie Peasegood, who did a fantastic job of keeping the teams on track, in getting through a frankly quite Einstein list of questions. OK, the CDL team, "We thought it was a disco" didn't do that well overall but of course it is the taking part that counts and we did that whole heartedly!

During the evening we were joined by a Dalek, which sounded very much like Little Britain's Vicky Pollard and Eddie Large, who was just able to see over the podium to raise a few laughs.

The seriousness of what everyone was there for was underlined when a film was shown of a current Marie Curie patient, terminally ill with cancer, who is being home nursed in the South West. The guests responded enthusiastically and generously during the evening's auction and CDL were delighted to see the items we collected fetched a good sum of money. Amongst those items were a case of Estee Lauder beauty products, donated by Beauty Editor, Nadine Baggott, a signed Bristol Rovers football, a signed Bristol Rugby ball and rugby shirt. The football alone raised an impressive £200.

Other auction lots included a tour of the new Cabot Circus shopping development in Bristol, prior to opening and "Manager for the Day" at the Mercure Holland House Hotel.

Rowetta Satchell of X Factor fame was not only one of our team members but our quiz round host, along with Terry Longden of "The Salon". Both Rowetta and Terry were great fun and gave us a lot of laughs during the evening. Rowetta sang a Stevie Wonder number "People" as a finale before guests moved to participate in the casino and other events which rounded of the evening.

We were delighted to be joined by one of our sponsored players from Bristol Rugby, Mariano Sambucetti (Sambu) as well as Bristol lock, Roy Winters,, solicitors Alistair Govier and Clive Weeks of Thring Townsend Lee and Pemberton and Withy King respectively and Nick Wood from our fantastic design team.

We are absolutely thrilled that so much interest and most importantly, nursing hours were secured for the charity and are now looking forward to next year, where we have the expectation of raising even more.

Thank you to Penny, Jon and Ian from Marie Curie, who have been a delight to liaise with throughout and looked after us all on the night.

New Look ILEX Journal

There is set to be an exciting change to the ILEX Journal and a fresh new look. As part of that, ILEX will be providing information and advice from a careers panel, selected from national law firms, only two selected recruitment consultancies and ILEX themselves.

We are always keen to support the Institute and its membership so we were delighted to have been invited to participate in the careers section. You can expect to catch salary reviews and the first career advice topics from us over the course of the next few weeks.

Introducing thecvfairy

Now it isn't only our registered candidates who can benefit from our skills and advice when it comes to writing and presenting a curriculum vitae which does what it is supposed to do; gain the offer of an interview.

This week sees the launch of thecvfairy.com, where, whatever your experience, status and aspirations, you can provide the facts and let the cv fairy turn those facts into an attractive, "grabbing" and sufficiently detailed (not verbose) CV.

At Carpe Diem Legal, we are used to seeing 100's of CV's every day and despite there being plenty of CV templates available, lots of tips on the do's and don'ts of CV writing (including those we provide) we still see CV's riddled with spelling mistakes, grammatical errors and which run to "War & Peace", or are so sparse they just don't give enough information to make it to the short list.

Now, anyone can have a professional CV tailor written for them, quickly, and feel confident that it will say the right things about them.

With a competitive labour market, set to get even more competitive, our candidates know that a professionally written CV gives them the edge and now the cvfairy can grant that wish to you!

For more information go to http://www.thecvfairy.com/ or email thecvfairy@hotmail.com

BEP Awards