Legal advice: Age-old bias

Employers should be examining their ageism policy.

By Rebecca Caws of thePublican.com's team of legal experts from London solicitors Joelson Wilson.​

Another year has just gone and none of us are getting any younger. Few of us, however, would contemplate that our age would go against us in the workplace, yet the concept of ageism is becoming an increasingly hot topic.

The UK is due to implement part of a European directive relating to ageism by October 2006. The government consulted on age discrimination in 2002 (The Way Ahead) and 2003 (Age Matters). This year the Department of Trade and Industry will be consulting on draft legislation, which is set to include:

• A default retirement age of 65 (while allowing employees to request working beyond 65)
• Monitoring of retirement age provisions to allow a five-year review
• The ability for employers to impose earlier retirement ages if justified.

So what are the implications for employers in the licensed industry? The aim is to eliminate age discrimination in the workplace, from the recruitment stage right through to termination of employment, for whatever reason.

This means that job advertisements would no longer be able to state an age range unless there are extremely good reasons to justify it - health and safety issues, for example. Nor will they be permitted to make more subtle suggestions, such as "young environment" which might indirectly discriminate against older applicants.

Age Positive, a campaign set up to promote age diversity in the workplace, has given this topic a lot of publicity, but some older members of society do not feel confident that legislation will make any difference to the difficulties they face. When the draft regulations are published it may give workers more security, but it is important that employers should take the proposed changes on board and adapt accordingly sooner rather than later. For example, the operator of a vibrant city-centre bar may automatically ignore applications from older workers at the moment. He might think this is justifiable because senior workers would not fit in with the bar's vibrant youthful atmosphere, but how can he be sure until he has at least interviewed the applicant?

There are other considerations to keep in mind, such as selection for promotion.

This is something that can be ageist from both ends of the scale. Imagine that someone needs to be promoted to run a managed pub. The pub operator might consider a younger worker too immature and lacking in experience to take on the responsibility. He might equally feel that an older worker is probably going to retire soon, so there is no point in selecting him either. This is ageist: we should all learn to look at an individual's achievements, experience, skills and plans, when dealing in this area. After all you're never too old to learn.