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In order to tackle this discrimination, the Labour government introduced the Age Discrimination Act On October 1st 2006, following E.U requirements on all member states to do so. This is now surpassed by the Equality Act 2010. This made it unlawful to discriminate against workers because of age. Employers were required to ensure they had policies in place designed to prevent discrimination in:
Our own work, in association with ACAS, in promoting this legislation and in educating employers, showed that there was widespread confusion amongst employers as to the law in relation to age and employment. One of the major omissions from the process was a lack of monitoring. The government failed to put in place any monitoring of the public sector employers for their recruitment and redundancy practices. There is no base line figure for them to understand if the procedures in place are working for better or worse. In 2009 we began our first audit, which looked into the age diversity of the existing workforce of County Councils and London Borough Councils. Most councils were able to produce the required results. A few failed to respond to the FOI requests, but the statistical breakdown by age groups across the council was inconsistent and no councils published the results for the public. Now that we had a base line figure of employees by age, we decided in 2010 to expand our research in order to monitor Recruitment and Redundancy as well as age within the existing workforce for these local authorities. The age groups used were (under 25, 25 – 49 and 50+). Our findings showed worrying trends. Age Audit 2009: Finding the baseline figure – Full report Age Audit 2010: Ageism in the Public Sector – Full report |
