A headline in this weekend’s papers had me thinking; “Let us work for longer, demand more retirees”.  I was puzzled by the apparent contradiction until I realised that it should have read: “Let us work for longer,” demand more retirees.

Of such errors, small fortunes can be made. Ask Lynne Truss, author of Eats, Shoots & Leaves; the Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation,” published a few years ago.

What at first seemed like a journey into lateral, creative ways of reshaping work and retirement was in fact a familiar drum being banged; “Increasing numbers of employees are being forced to take retirement when they don’t feel ready and can’t afford it,” wrote Jill Insley.  Well yes, and TAEN has been pointing this out for, let me see…how long?

There are many reasons why more people are eschewing retirement at state pension age if they get the chance. Blog readers will know the back stories well enough, including the one about pensions and affordability. See the contribution from our star visitor and TAEN trustee Ros Altmann, for example..

Defined benefits pension funds have all but closed shop to new entrants and the defined contributions alternatives offer far less predictability of income. With all the upheaval in the stock market, it seems a rash moment for budding retirees to take punts in the annuities market, so given the chance, they stay put.

People have other reasons for putting off the day of retirement. Everyone with savings is in the same boat – more or less. Interest rates are at their lowest ebb in living memory. A friend of mine (who has enough wealth to never need to care about these matters) is grumbling about the negligible returns on his National Savings account. I am amazed that he has opted for the equivalent of shoving his riches under the mattress, but there we are.

Less surprising are the results of the Age Concern and Help the Aged survey released last week and which triggered Insley’s article, mentioned above. They  suggest that more than 100,000 people in Britain were forced into retirement against their wishes last year. Forced retirement is being used to subsidise redundancy shake-outs. We always knew it would.

But 100,000 forced retirements is a lot - enough people to fill the old Wembley stadium. And it will go on, year after year, until we do something about it. In terms of infringing the human rights of older workers, it is a massive slur on our national record.

Think of the waste. Measure it in willing people deprived of the chance to earn a living - and pay their income taxes. Or think of it in lost ambitions, opportunities to continue in a social world known and possibly enjoyed. Or perhaps do the sums in lost knowledge and skills to organisations that could use them.

The fact is that the national default retirement age has institutionalised retirement around the age of 65. There is still widespread ignorance about it among employers. Some lawyers have not helped matters either by advising that the best way to avoid tribunal claims is to retire everyone at the same age. How misguided can you get!

A couple of weeks ago, TAEN was called by an anguished employer saying that he wanted to employ someone over 65 who was the best candidate for the job.  Was he allowed to do so? (Clearly, he did not realise that the default retirement age was an optional thing which was up to him to use or ignore as he chose.)

Of such stuff is this national policy made, which the CBI and some employers continue to defend, as though the roof would fall in on British industry if it were to be abandoned. 

The Engineering Employers Federation maintains that all is well, with the procedure which gives employees the right to ask to work on. “Most requests to work on are accepted by employers,” they say.

A little bit of probing reveals a different story. People often don’t even ask to work on simply because they are not aware of their rights to do so. Sure enough, only a minority of employers refuse all requests, but there are gradations of stances beyond that. Some employers accept only a tiny number of requests while a few enable anyone who asks to work on to do so.  

So your chances of continuing to work beyond 65 depend as much on good fortune as your capabilities and value as a worker. Is this really fair?

Employers have a duty to consider requests to continue working but again there is a range of seriousness in the way this duty is applied. Line managers are often not clear about their responsibilities, according to recent research by Matt Flynn of Middlesex University.

Managerial attitudes towards older workers can vary from highly appreciative to decidedly negative even within the same organisation.  Moreover, the fact that most organisations have neither criteria nor procedures for considering requests adds to the hit and miss nature of responses.

Bizarrely, even the most ill-considered or capricious response to a request is unchallengeable at the employment tribunal other than on grounds of failure to follow the right procedure. The employer has a bomb-proof case, unless they have mangled their procedural duties in some way.

The real challenge now is to prepare for what comes after the default retirement age. The more we look at it, the more it should be clear that shedding forced retirement could enable organisations to gain in performance and quality, but we need more thought given to what this means.

TAEN is working on it, among others I am sure. This week I will be speaking to a meeting of the National Pensions Network. It will be a good opportunity to try out some ideas, not least the lateral implications of working longer but retiring more.

The reality at present is that for many people retirement is a myth. ‘Retirement’ implies leaving of one’s own volition. What we have is lawful ageist dismissal. There are other angles to take, but this at least leads to one interpretation of The Observer’s Eats, Shoots & Leaves type headline. So let us work for longer, and demand more real retirees!