ABSTRACT
Suggestions by sociologists and gerontologists that there should be no set minimum retirement age and that it should be decided after medical and other examinations of each individual case are 'utopian in a century of standardisation and social discipline where, willy-nilly, individualism is no longer possible'. It can be argued, therefore, that a blanket raising of the minimum retirement age may cause undue hardship in some occupations but none in others. It is generally agreed that the financial incentive of pension increments for continuing work after retirement age has been of marginal value, if any at all. What the Act intended to be minimum retirement ages, the public has come to consider as the normal retirement ages. The Committee of the National Joint Advisory Council were concerned about the ill-effects of this lack of effective policy for pension preservation on labour mobility and on the eventual incidence of occupational retirement pensions.
