UK – Banking and financial services group Barclays has announced it is to pay 13,500 current and former part-time workers back-dated pensions benefits worth some £100m (€163m). The news follows HSBC’s decision to do the same for its equivalent workers after a ruling in the UK House of Lords last year that part-time workers in the UK are entitled to the same pension rights as their full-time colleagues.

HSBC is expected to pay pensions to around 2,000 part-time staff, which could cost them as much as £25m. The ruling in the Lords said that the right to pensions benefits for part-time workers should be back-dated to 1976 and is in line with an earlier European Court of Justice decision that gave part-time workers in Europe the right to join pension schemes retrospectively.

The financial services union, Unifi, welcomed the news but said some of the more technical details needed to be ironed out, including how part-time should be defined and whether additional time worked qualified as pensionable time.