Employers could seek to legally justify why workers should retire sooner than the state pension age, creating a bigger gap between retirement and being able to draw a state pension.
By Louisa Peacock
David Yeandle, head of employment at manufacturers’ body the EEF, said employers could make use of existing law to ‘objectively justify’ why some groups of workers deserved to retire earlier, as is the case in France.
“At the moment, employers can objectively justify why some workers’ [retirement] ages should be lower. This may be used more as the pension age rises and the default retirement age goes … there will be a lot of employers who will try to justify having a lower retirement age,” he said.
A construction firm using crane drivers, who had worked for 30 years in a physically demanding job, could seek to enforce a maximum age for their on-site workers, which could be younger than 65, he said. However, with the state pension age due to rise to 66 from 2016 for men and 2020 for women, workers could have to wait even longer to collect their state pension.
telegraph.co.uk