Work until you're 70

Would you want to work to 70?

Breakfast's main story this morning is a radical shake-up in the way bosses treat older workers.

Under the proposals, which will be published today by the Trade Secretary Patricia Hewitt, your boss won't be able to force you to retire until you're 70 years old.

The new legislation could see many more people working into their late sixties.

That would completely reverse the trend over the last couple of decades for taking early retirement, sometimes in your mid-fifties.

This morning on Breakfast, we looked at age-ism at work - and we asked: do people really want to work until they drop?

We spoke to the Trade and Industry Secretary Patricia Hewitt

She will formally announce the plans later today.

"Nobody now would think about advertising a job as being for men only, or for whites only," she told BBC Breakfast.

"Nobody would think now about having two different pay rates, one for men and one for women, and yet all those things happened before those laws were passed.

"So I think our new age discrimination laws will help to make a difference."

The new proposals - part of a consultation document - are not intended to force people to work longer, according to Patricia Hewitt: they're about extending choice.

She says that currently "hundreds of thousands" of people are made redundant in their 50s or even late 40s.

"They then find that they can never get another job and that is dreadful for them.

"It often makes people extremely miserable and damages their health and damages their family, but of course it is also a loss for business and the economy because all that experience, all those skills, are going to waste."

We also spoke to Dominic Murphy, who has been the victim of age discrimination in the IT industry and Michelle Mitchell from Age Concern

Under the new rules, employers would not be allowed to stipulate the required ages for a job or to tell older employees they did not qualify for training schemes.

Currently employers can set compulsory retirement ages for staff. But under the new plans that would not be allowed and they would have to allow people to work until they were 70.

The government believes that unfair age discrimination costs the economy billions of pounds - as much as £16bn a year - and stops people realising their true potential. The measures being suggested by the government would bring the UK into line with European Union employment law.

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