You're as old as you feel in the workplace
IT IS becoming an article of faith that as the population ages we are all going to have to work longer. As pensions minister I began the process of raising women’s state pension age to 65 and now both sexes are facing a rise to 68. This will not affect anybody immediately about to retire but by the time today’s newest recruits come to draw their pensions there could easily be moves afoot to raise the retirement age even further.
It is against this background that judges have been deciding whether bosses should be able to dismiss
employees at 65. There is here an obvious dilemma: some people retain their cutting edge until well into their 90s while others begin slowing down in their 60s. I know very well that I cannot now do things
which I took for granted in my 30s, such as existing on very little sleep.
It is therefore essential that there is a line at which contracts come to a natural end and can only be continued with the consent of both parties. Traditionally that line has always been regarded as
state pension age.
When I was in the Department for Employment I held a competition to find Britain’s oldest worker. I was keen to find somebody of 75 because I thought it would send a powerful message to employers, who were reluctant to take people 20 years before that age. To be eligible people had to be working full
time and not for themselves.
At 75 indeed! The oldest male worker in this country at that time turned out to be 94. He went to work on his bicycle and did so six days a week. The oldest female worker was 93, worked five days a week and still sang in a choir.
She lived to be 100 and was still singing in that choir up to a couple of years before her death.
It is perfectly possible therefore for people to work productively at very considerable ages but it is hardly the norm and there needs to be a break point at which employers can assess whether energy and talent are present in sufficient quantities.
It will always be the case that some people are young at 90 and some are old at 40. If there is no natural point at which it is lawful to terminate employment then employers will have no choice but to dismiss workers on grounds of performance with all the hurt and legal procedures involved.
Ageism is much in the news with television companies being accused of routinely practising it. What we really need is flexibility: some people want to work until they drop while others want to reap the rewards of a lifetime’s hard work and spend their latter years at a more leisurely pace.
Some want to work part-time but not full-time and some change course altogether, setting up businesses with lump sum pension payments. The law should not produce a line so rigid that it destroys those choices.
Future governments are going to have to make hard decisions, especially when medical science produces the breakthroughs that will remove some of the diseases which shorten our lives. It is doubly regrettable that Gordon Brown should have so comprehensively plundered the pension schemes which
would have underpinned people’s financial security into old age.
He is desperate to cling on to his job despite doing it badly – many others who have done their jobs well are being forced to work on because he has taken their money.
A comprehensive policy for an ageing population is long overdue and parts of it are unlikely to be popular but we need vision not piecemeal legislation.