Roderick Ramage provides a rough guide to TUPE, pensions & contracting-out
Some employees’ pension protection rights, even though linked to TUPE, are not subject to restriction on contracting out.
Changing contract terms
Unless the contract expressly provides for it, no party can alter it unilaterally, but the parties can alter it consensually. Alterations of contracts are themselves made by contract. Employment contracts are no different from other contracts, but, because of the respective bargaining strengths of the parties, employers, if they stay successfully on the right side of the boundary between business justification and unfair dismissal, can vary employment contracts unilaterally by a process of an offer of new terms, consultation, warning, and eventually dismissal, coupled with an offer of reengagement on new terms: technically, if this process runs its course, what starts as a proposal to vary the contract ends as a rescission and new contract.
The contracting-out restriction
Normal contract rules do not apply to statutory employment protection rights. Employers and employees may not contract out of the latter’s statutory employment protection rights, except by an ACAS conciliation or a compromise
