Here’s an announcement we have been waiting for. The Government opens a consultation this morning on the abolition of the default retirement age (DRA). “But I thought the previous Government was looking into all that,” you say. Well yes. This is the way of things. Reviews are one thing, consultations are another.

It’s great news! The institutionalised discrimination of kicking people out of work at 65 will have to stop. The plan is to phase the new world into play from 1 April 2011.  Removal of the DRA will begin then with transitional arrangements covering the period until 1 October.

I commented on the news on BBC Wales this morning bright and early. I might have been singing a chorus of “Land of my Fathers” with the Tredegar Male Voice Choir, my welcome was so fulsome. However there are some points to bear in mind which are more worrying. 

First, there is plenty of time between now and next October for employers to weed out the over-65s they want to dispose of, without any fear of an unfair dismissal claim. We might expect a rash of such clear-outs before D-Day finally arrives.

Back in 2006, when the Age Regulations were about to be introduced, there was a similar process in train. I remember attending a seminar a swish legal firm had put on for its clients, HR managers in the main.

Several were planning to “cut out the dead wood” in their workforces whilst the law still allowed them to do so.  I can’t believe that such thinking will have been eradicated in the past four years.

The second thing is that we should be aware that employers will still be able to have their own mandatory retirement age, providing they can demonstrate that it fulfills a legitimate aim and is a proportionate means of achieving such.

A case in the Court of Appeal relating to the retirement of a senior partner at a law firm focused on this point recently, and confirmed what we already really knew, that the said legitimate aim could be peculiar to the business needs of a specific organisation, rather than the wider society. So, who knows? We could have some employers hoping to hang on to their own mandatory retirement policies.

This move can only be a first step. Many employers will need to adopt a new mindset regarding the ageing workforce. For so long, company chairmen have claimed in their annual reports that, “Our people are our most valuable asset”. Now, more and more they will have to prove they believe this.