AGE OF COMPULSORY RETIREMENT (Hansard, 31 January 1978)

§ Mr. Ivor Stanbrook (Orpington)

I beg to move, That leave be given to bring in a Bill to make void any provision for compulsory retirement on the ground of age below the age of seventy; to provide for exceptions to the general rule; and for connected purposes. The Prime Minister is 65. He was reported in the Daily Telegraph last week as saying All the best Prime Ministers I know are over the age of 65. On the whole, I would not want anyone to become a Prime Minister till they are over the age of 65, and the newspaper account goes on, he said in an apparent reference to Mrs. Thatcher, who is 52. The Prime Minister is lucky. There is no compulsory retirement age for politicians. My Bill seeks to extend the Prime Minister's good fortune to everyone who is fit and willing to continue in employment after reaching pensionable age.

We have had excellent Prime Ministers who have been in their 80s. We have had at least one in his 20s. We shall shortly have an exceptionally fine Prime Minister, in the person of my right hon. Friend the Member for Finchley (Mrs. Thatcher), in her 50s.

In terms of quality, age is as irrelevant for Prime Ministers as it is for plumbers. There is no fixed age determining when a man's usefulness to his employer suddenly ends. It is a ridiculously old fashioned and fuddy-duddy idea that men and women lose their capacity for employment while they are still in their 60s. For Britain it is a terrible waste of manpower, experience and skill, and we badly need skilled manpower. For the individuals concerned, it is a matter which can easily cause great personal unhappiness and loneliness.

I am not speaking about pensionable age. I am all in favour of people retiring on pension as early as they please. For some of them, of course, the earlier, the better. But my Bill will do nothing to prevent that.

I seek to remove the contractual restraints on people who wish to go on working after pensionable age but who 270 are prevented from doing so by an arbitrarily determined age figure. In some respects our society is obsessed by age figures when those figures are irrelevant to the contribution which any individual can make.

We all know that this House has among its hon. Members many elderly so-called young men and many very virile so-called old men—[HON. MEMBERS: "Name them!"] I shall not mention examples. I am sure that every hon. Member present at the moment can think of some.

People are living longer nowadays and are more active in old age than ever before. A man of 65 can expect, on average, to live for at least another 12 years, and a woman of 60 for another 20 years. We should not condemn them all, regardless of their skill, wisdom and experience, to spend those years in enforced idleness if they wish to be employed.

Some people look forward eagerly to the prospect of retirement and enjoy it and lead happy and useful lives when they do—and good luck to them—but there are others who dread it. Very often they dread it simply because their employment is their whole life. They depend upon it and dread the prospect of losing their job, and therefore they dread the prospect of retirement.

The White Paper, National Superannuation and Social Insurance, published by the Labour Government in 1969, argued against lowering the pensionable age for men on the ground that Such a move would undoubtedly encourage earlier retirement when the general need of the country's economy is for people to continue to work as long as possible; and the increase in pension expenditure and loss of contribution income would be serious. That was the Labour Government's view as recently as 1969.

I make no argument about pension. As far as I am concerned pensionable age is a different matter from the right to continue to work after pensionable age, but there is a lot of truth in that quotation.

The Beveridge Report of 1942 noted that there is no reason to doubt the power of large numbers of people to go on working with advantage to the community and happiness to themselves after reaching the minimum pensionable age of 65 for men and 60 for women. 271 So Beveridge provided that men and women could defer their retirement on pension for up to five years and so earn an enhanced pension when eventually they did retire. Unfortunately, that wise provision in the Beveridge Report is still not effective because some employers, including the Government, and some trade unions cling to the notion that a man is too old to work at 65, and a woman at 60.

I am told by some people that later retirement would increase unemployment. That is a fallacious argument, because a country cannot reduce unemployment by cutting the size of its labour force. Many people who have been compulsorily retired at 60 or 65 are now among the registered unemployed. At the Orpington employment office, for instance—and this is an area where the average age is lower than the national level—on 12th January of this year 304 out of 1,235 of those registered as unemployed were over the age of 60. There was no comparable problem for school leavers.

Strong feelings are held by individuals who are affected by rules of this kind. Among the letters that I have received is one from an engineer designer who was compulsorily retired by Hawker Siddeley Dynamics at the age of 65. He had been working on a device to harness wave energy, and he said: I know that this is the time of my life when my ideas are most fruitful. Never in my 'teens or' twenties could I have the knowledge, experience and confidence I have now—and yet they make me retire or else! Incentive, yes, for volunteers to carry on. I would welcome it. Another letter is from a senior principal scientist who has just been retired at the age of 61 from the Ministry of Defence. He had been working on an advanced technological project of great value to this country. There is no one at the Ministry of Defence to replace him. There is no one even to work the equipment that he had been using, which is an extremely expensive item.

My third example was an usher at the Old Bailey. When he was retired last year at the age of 65 he was still a fit and strong gentle giant who added to the smooth running and efficiency of that place.

The country cannot afford to dispense with the services of such people, and 272 the view of Age Concern, the charity that is devoted to the interests or the elderly, is instructive. It wants the compulsory retirement age to be abolished and replaced by a flexible retirement age that will allow men and women to retire at a time that is appropriate to their own wishes, abilities and needs, without regard to income, social status or sex. I believe that we in this House should support that objective. I equally believe that the Bill will go some way towards achieving it.