The end of ageism? Retire when you like from this weekend

Age equality campaigners have hailed the end of employment rules forcing people on to the “scrapheap” at the age of 65.

Bosses will now no longer be able to set a mandatory retirement age, as the government brings in changes to reflect people living longer and healthier lives.

A phasing-out period of the default retirement age (DRA), which enables employers to force staff to retire at 65, is completed this weekend.

Greg McCracken, of Age Scotland, said: “This is a victory for older workers who for too long have been consigned to the scrapheap for no reason other than prejudice.

“We hope that by removing this arbitrary date for employers, attitudes towards older workers will quickly evolve to look at their skills and experience, not their date of birth.

“With an ageing population traditional rigid ideas about retirement are changing. Many people will want to work longer for personal or financial reasons and prejudice should not lock them out of the workplace.”

He called on the government to continue to work with employers and trade groups to highlight the benefits of hiring older staff.

Liz Field, chief executive of the Financial Skills Partnership, said greater age diversity would make a more productive workforce.

She said: “In these difficult economic times, older workers can add resilience to a business’s workforce, offering a vital blend of hard-soft skills that allow them to react in a more productive manner to economic crises.”

However, some businesses have expressed strong reservations, particularly over how smaller firms will cope.

Colin Borland, head of external affairs in Scotland for the Federation of Small Businesses, said: “It’s important that businesses retain the flexibility to keep the right people in the right job.

“We are, therefore, concerned that scrapping the default retirement age will remove this discretion and leave small businesses, when they do have staff who are no longer performing, at the mercy of the lengthy, uncertain and complex procedures for removing staff on capability grounds.”

But he insisted that no firm would want to ditch “valued, high-performing” staff just because they had reached 65. “Many small business owners do not intend to retire their staff at 65,” he said. “They understand the valuable contribution and skills that older workers bring to the business and FSB figures show that a quarter of our members employ staff who are over 65.”

CBI chief policy director Katja Hall said: “The government has dithered too long on this issue. The DRA was valued as it helped employers to plan ahead and manage changes to the workforce. We urgently need an effective new framework for retirement planning.”

Employment relations minister Edward Davey said about two-thirds of employers already operate without fixed retirement ages.

He said: “Retirement should be a matter of choice rather than compulsion – people deserve the freedom to work for as long as they want and are able to do so.”

The new measures, which have been phased in over a six-month period from April, allow for a few exceptions, such as police officers and air traffic controllers.

Saga director-general Ros Altmann described fears that the change could bar younger people from finding jobs as a “fallacy”. She said: “If you have got more people working at any age they will have more money to spend and create jobs for more people.”