As advised under Parliamentary Question No 77, a long standing, process exists where staff who are retiring at normal retirement date or earlier are provided with the option to attend a seminar to help plan for their retirement. This is provided by many companies in the public and private sector to retiring staff and is considered good practice to help staff adjust to retirement. This service has been provided by AIB to its staff going back over many years. These seminars, conducted over two days, involve a number of presentations from organisations such as the Retirement Planning Council of Ireland, the Department of Social Protection and medical practitioners etc.
As announced previously, the Bank's exit programme, which comprises early retirement and voluntary severance, is aimed in part at reducing costs by c. €350m by 2014. The process is ongoing, and the early retirement programme runs until the end of this year. As part of the Bank/IBOA mediation on the programme implementation, facilitated by Mr Kevin Foley, LRC, AIB committed to providing outplacement, retirement and redundancy support to all exiting employees, and the retirement seminars are provided as part of this deliverable. Further public disclosures in relation to the exit programme, including costs, are published on page 239 of AIB's 2012 Annual Financial Report, and page 75 of AIB's 2013 Half Yearly Report.
In the last suite of seminars which were completed in the period October 2012 to April 2013, employees across every organisational grade attended the seminar. This included employees scheduled to retire out to the end of 2013 under both the early retirement programme and normal retirement.
On the basis of very reduced numbers exiting on normal retirement in 2014 and 2015, AIB is currently reviewing the format for the seminars and we expect to have a revised approach for any future participants.
