Mr. D McGonagle v Jaguar Land Rover Limited — 2020

The claimant brought a direct age discrimination claim after his voluntary redundancy ended on 31 March 2019, when he was aged 54 years and 8 months. He said he was denied access to the Retired Manager's Loan Agreement Plan because of its minimum age criterion, and that the respondent's refusal to extend his leaving date until September 2019 was also because of age.

The tribunal found that the claimant had raised the possibility of extending his leaving date, partly because it would bring him within the RMLAP. It found the decision not to extend was made because there was no business reason to retain him beyond 31 March 2019, while there was a business reason to extend the chosen comparator's leaving date. It concluded that this part of the claim was not direct age discrimination.

The respondent conceded that the RMLAP age criterion was direct age discrimination. The tribunal rejected some of the pleaded aims, including reducing costs as pleaded, but accepted that aligning eligibility between the legacy defined benefit pension scheme and the defined contribution scheme pursued intergenerational fairness. It found the age criterion was appropriate and necessary to achieve parity between those schemes, and therefore justified. The age discrimination claim was dismissed in its entirety.