Don’t dismiss years of experience

11:29am Wednesday 5th December 2007

ODD job man Roy Townsend has a full head of hair and a broad smile. He looks 15 years younger than he really is and has the energy of a vanload of adolescents.

And he's still working, in spite of the fact that last week he celebrated his 80th birthday.

He received a fanfare from his workmates at Swindon company Multivac. And a glowing tribute from Andrew Stark, the firm's marketing manager, who said: "The very fact that he started with us at a time when most people would be retiring says a lot about him."

Actually it says even more about Multivac, which is clearly one of those unusual and excellent organisations that don't believe people's minds fossilise and their joints seize up the moment they qualify for a bus pass.

Multivac employs several people who are over 60 and at least one, besides Roy, who has passed 65.

All credit to it. Like the Swindon B&Q which until two years ago was employing 92-year-old Reg Hill part-time, it doesn't give jobs to silver-haired workers because it wants to be nice to the oldies.

It does so because it knows they are still capable of doing a good day's work.

In spite of much-lauded legislation that came into force in October last year and was supposed to give older people the right to go on working, around a million of them have been put out to grass costing the country an estimated £30 billion.

Want an insult to men and women who have energy, enthusiasm, commitment, skills, knowledge and a working lifetime's experience.

And it's happening because the aforesaid much-lauded legislation contained a glaring loophole. It allowed companies to impose their own mandatory retirement age limit on workers over 65.

A spokeswoman at Age Concern's London HQ cited as an example a skilled electrical engineer she talked to recently. He wanted to go on working and was quite capable of doing so. But his employers used the default retirement rule and on his 65th birthday they gave him the heave-ho.

How stupid! Even dafter is the case of a highly-trained lawyer who worked for the Crown Prosecution Service.

The CPS refused to budge from its default retirement rule and allow him to continue. And now, it seems, it's having a tough time finding a replacement for him. How sensible is that?

Bosses at the CPS - and everywhere else - should know by now that many a good tune can be played on a well-polished elderly fiddle. They could be throwing away a Stradivarius.

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