Appointment of eventual with age above 70 years.

The consultation deals with the possibility of appointing temporary staff over 70 years of age.

Article 12 of Royal Legislative Decree 5/2015, of 30 October, approving the consolidated text of the Law on the Basic Status of Public Employees (hereinafter, TRLEBEP) refers to temporary staff as one of the classes of public employees who provide their services in the Administrations in the following terms:

“1. It is contingent personnel who, by virtue of appointment and on a non-permanent basis, only perform functions expressly qualified as trust or special advice, being paid from the budgetary appropriations appropriated for this purpose.

2. The Civil Service laws that are enacted in the development of this Statute will determine the governing bodies of the Public Administrations that may have this type of personnel. The maximum number shall be established by the respective governing bodies. This number and the retributive conditions will be public.

3. The appointment and cessation will be free. The cessation will take place, in any case, when the authority to which the trust or advisory function is given takes place.

4. The status of temporary staff may not constitute merit for access to the Public Service or for internal promotion.

5. The general regime for career officials shall apply to the staff members concerned, as far as is appropriate to the nature of their status.”

From the precept transcribed, it follows that both the appointment with the cessation of contingent personnel occurs in a different way to that regulated for official personnel.

In this sense, temporary staff enjoy a special nature, which means that there are specialties with respect to career civil servants, one of them being that their appointment and dismissal are based on criteria of political trust, without the requirements established for civil servants being enforceable in either one or the other.

Therefore, although other provisions established for civil servants, for example, the permit system, apply to them, this does not apply to those relating to the birth and termination of the relationship.

Therefore, it is understood that the forced retirement due to age regulated in the TRLEBEP itself for civil servants is not extensible to contingent personnel, so that the age of 70 would not operate as a limit when appointing or dismissing contingent personnel.

All of the foregoing is without prejudice to recalling that, according to the regime of competences of this management center, the answers to queries issued by this general directorate are merely informative and, consequently, are not of a binding criterion, nor do they give rise to rights or expectations of law, nor imply any link with the type of procedures to which they refer. Furthermore, in the absence of a mandatory or binding nature, the bodies receiving such replies may, where appropriate, finally take a decision that does not correspond to the opinion contained therein.

The responses to queries contained in this bulletin address the issues raised in the light of the regulations in force at the time of their issuance, so that such responses may be affected by subsequent legislative changes or judicial decisions.