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Welfare Reform Green Paper

My Lords, I draw attention to one very happy feature of the Green Paper. Chapter 4 on employing older workers helps to complete the jigsaw, to which my two noble friends drew attention, in that the employer’s responsibility for employing older workers is becoming an absolutely central part not only of this debate but also of the debate that will lead to the Government’s White Paper arising from the report of Adair Turner—the noble Lord, Lord Turner of Ecchinswell—later this spring. The connection is employer reluctance to take on more legal responsibility for people over the age of 65—that is one debate. The subject of another debate is that until recently it has been very convenient to say that it may be doing many people a public service to allow them to retire early. As we all know, for a million reasons, including the current pensions problems, employers will not easily be able to say that that is part of the solution. So I reinforce what my two noble friends said—that is, between now and the publication of the response to the Adair Turner report, building on this Green Paper there has to be an important crossover between this debate and the responsibility of the million people whom we want to get back into work and the construction of the answer to the Turner analysis on pensions.