Mandatory retirement ages should be banned to help tackle poverty and challenge the assumption that the older people get, the more incompetent they become.

Help the Aged’s research on the state of the UK’s older population found more than two million living in poverty and more than one million who wanted to carry on working after the age of 65. Only a third of those who retired early did so voluntarily.

Later this year the European Court of Justice will decide whether mandatory retirement ages are legal. In the UK, a government review on the issue is expected in 2011.

However, campaigners say 2011 is too late. They argue current regulations ‘effectively allow employers to dismiss any employee when they reach either 65 or the employer’s normal retirement age’.

‘All workers, irrespective of their age, should be allowed to continue to work for as long as they wish,’ the report says. ‘Increasingly, as the population grows older and skills shortages become more acute, it is likely to become an economic necessity for both the country and the individual.’

It adds: ‘The mandatory retirement age must be abolished. Otherwise we are effectively encouraging the continued presumption of a link between age and competency which undermines the very principle of equal treatment.’

Other recommendations include:

• more investment in adult education
• a targeted strategy to reduce pensioner poverty
• an automatic right to all means tested benefits
• a public sector age equality duty to compel service providers to take account of the needs of different age groups
• urgent action to end fuel poverty by 2010.

Paul Cann, director of policy, said the report’s findings, including low benefit take-up, loneliness and being ignored or treated like children by service providers, represented a ‘catalogue of facts that shame us all’.

He added: ‘For as long as, deep down, we continue to see older people as, at worst, redundant and “in the way” and at best as a frightening foretaste of our own future, we will continue to inflict poverty, prejudice and neglect on the very people who created the world we now enjoy.’

Spotlight 2008, www.helptheaged.org.uk

by Susan Downer

susan@newstartmag.co.uk