What a disappointment the High Court Decision is on the default retirement age. Mr Justice Blake, in a long and carefully assembled decision, decided not to overturn the provisions in the 2006 Employment Equality (Age) Regulations which allow employers to compulsorily retire people at the age of 65.

That last bit is for visitors from Mars, by the way! This issue has been centre stage on and off for some three years now, having trod the road to the European Court of Justice  in its weary journey to the final dénouement last week.

Short of a visit to the Court of Appeal, there is not much one can do about the judgment itself. Would another judge on another day have taken the same decision? Who knows?

What if there had been wing members to the court from both sides of industry, advising on the real practical implications which lawyers may not fully understand? If, if, if… Who can say what could have been or might have been?

It seems to have been a darned close run thing anyway, and even ministers and civil servants seem not to have been confident of the outcome until the last minute. One thing I took from my 1970s Labour Law seminars at the LSE was that judges are generally reluctant to overturn governments unless the grounds are clear and compelling.

Lord Denning, who chaired the Court of Appeal in those days, poked his oar in sometimes when he could see a ‘David and Goliath relationship’, but in this case we had neither Denning’s judicial audacity nor the little versus large story for such a toppling.

The Government played its cards shrewdly in announcing the review of the national default retirement a matter of days before the High Court hearing commenced. The judge admits that if there had been no such announcement he would have reached a different decision!

He would have done so – but didn’t. The Chartered Institute for Personnel and Development has commented that the outcome will be “damaging for business.”

It will.

“We do not buy the HR argument that businesses can’t manage their workforce without the DRA,” says the CIPD. “If you have poor performers in your organisation you should also have the performance management systems to deal with them.” Quite so.

The onion layers of this case may continue being peeled off for a while yet, though like Peer Gynt in Ibsen’s play of that name, we may never get to the heart of it all. How could the judge have been so convinced but not minded to remedy the wrong?

The key point is that like it or not, the buck has been passed to the evidence based review which so effectively rescued the Government’s chestnuts from the fire. When I phoned the Department for Business Innovation and Skills (BIS) to ask about the handling of the review process, they were in a spin.

When will the review be complete? Nobody knows. It could well be before the election, but that will be a ministerial decision. They have commissioned research which seems unlikely to be available before May so that doesn’t seem to add up.

Whatever hurrying up Ministers decide to engage in may be doomed to a race against time. Obviously, we ought to help!