Scrap retiring age, says Minister

13 April 2012

THE compulsory retirement age should be scrapped and people left to work as long as they want, the new Pensions Secretary has said.

Alan Johnson, who was promoted to the Cabinet earlier this month, believes such a policy would tackle ageism.

He declared: 'My instinctive feeling has always been that, compared to America, we are a pretty ageist society. As soon as they get over 50, people are being written off.

'In the US they don't have an ageist approach. I've always felt it would be much healthier if we had that system here.'

America outlawed age discrimination in 1967 and abolished the mandatory retirement age for most workers in 1986.

But such a move here - suggested by Johnson in an interview with a Sunday newspaper - would upset employers and could lead to staff working into their seventies or longer.

At present, British firms can set a mandatory retirement age, which is usually 60 or 65.

Scrapping the upper limit would be seen as a backdoor way of solving the growing pensions crisis.

Unions fear that if mandatory retirement was dropped, firms would raise the age at which workers could claim their company pension.

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