Trade and Industry written question – answered at on 6 December 2006.
To ask the Secretary of State for Trade and Industry pursuant to his answer of 27 November 2006, Official Report, column 386W, on the retirement age, what the aims were which the Government were seeking to achieve; and if he will make a statement.
I refer to my answer of
Yes0 people think so
No1 person thinks not
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Annotations
Joyce Glasser
Posted on 8 Dec 2006 2:31 pm (Report this annotation)
The objective of the EC Directive, under which the Regulations were drafted as secondary legislation, is to create equality of opportunity in employment, training and vocational education and to give disadantaged groups, such as over 50s, a recourse in law against discrimination. The Government's aim, as stated by Mr Fitzpatrick, is not the same. It is in fact nearly the opposite: The disadvantaged group must give way to the majority group, workers under 65.
The problem is that this will apply to the increasing number of over 65s who cannot afford to be retired (as can most career civil servants), cannot survive on the state pension and have no occupational pensions, and/or do not want to retire because their work is their reason for living.
Moreover, it comes as a surprise to learn that the Government's labour market objective is to recognise the need for workforce planning based on age or to refuse jobs to over impoverished 65s simply because some employees had restrictive occupational pension plans.
Surveys commissioned by the Government showed that few employers practiced workforce planning based on age, and, since the pension rules were changed last year to allow people to work and draw down pensions at the same time the second objective is no longer relevant. Moreover, since only half the working population has an occupational pension, it is a nonsense to deny jobs to employees of companies without an occupational pension on the grounds it would interfere with non-existent pensions -- or the pensions of other companies.
In the recent Judicial Review, Judge Davis conceded that policies to stop job blocking (which is now what the Government calls work force planning) are potentially age discriminatory and would have to be objectively justified to be lawful. The Government presented no evidence that job blocking was a big problem or that it always involved young vs old employees. A young person could block an older person's job or block the job for people his/her own age. It is doubtful whether this policy would be considered proportionate in a domestic tribunal or court, simply because there are less discriminatory ways of tackling the problem.
The manner in which the Directive was transposed into UK law gave rise to a Judicial Review by the group Age Concern's specially formed campaigning arm, Heyday. Heyday objected to a number of issues in the Regulations and these will now be referred to the ECJ. The Objectives stated by Mr Fitzpatrick were not always the Government's objectives. These have changed as the government realised their objectives were unjustifiable. I maintain the two remaining objectives provided by Mr Fitzpatrick are also unjustifiably discriminatory.