"For a healthy, functioning economy, we must capture the skills and experience of older workers for as long as possible. Older workers – especially older women – are playing an increasingly important role in the UK workforce. A voluntary higher average age of retirement is a positive goal, regardless of state pension age reform, and is compatible with the TUC's objective of flexible retirement. But this requires more than the crude mechanism of delaying their entitlement to the State Pension. This could leave even greater numbers of older workers facing hardship in the later years of their working lives, running down savings or relying on workingage benefits, which threatens their standard of living throughout retirement. It means doing the hard graft of implementing policies that enable more people to continue to work in their later years."

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