Let’s not jump on the default retirement age bandwagon

Your front-page article (‘Next government must address HR fears over scrapping of DRA’, Personnel Today, 11 May) revealed that 72% of HR professionals don’t want to scrap the default retirement age.

At last the profession has woken up and smelt the coffee. When I previously wrote to Personnel Today about this subject about 15 months ago, I felt I was a minority of one. Personnel Today, the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, and most commentators and other contributors at the time, were strong advocates of the Ditch the DRA campaign.

This topic is far bigger than mere equality for older workers – it’s about business efficiency and ever-growing youth unemployment. Social engineering to solve one problem invariably has ramifications elsewhere.

HR mustn’t feel it has been genetically programmed to jump on every equality bandwagon that happens to come along, or we will continue to never be taken seriously by our operational colleagues.

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Martin Manning, group personnel manager, Epwin Group