As of October 2011, employers will no longer be able to release staff purely because they reach 65, it was announced yesterday (29 July). Currently, employers can force staff to retire at 65, regardless of their circumstances.

However, Unite assistant general secretary Tony Burke warned that there are "a number of downsides" to the proposal, claiming some industry equipment, coupled with particular shift patterns, could be "quite onerous to people once they get into their 60s".

"We should be looking to lighten the load, not make it more difficult. There's also succession planning; companies need to think about the intake of young people, apprentices and trainees into the industry," he said.

Burke also warned that companies should not just rely on older workers staying on, as the workforce "will become a lot older, possibly less competitive and not as productive".

Pensions could also be an issue, he said, because many SME companies in the industry don't have a decent pension scheme.

"Industry needs to work together to consider how best to approach this, because otherwise there is a risk that we will end up with an aging workforce that isn't in the best interests of the industry."

BPIF corporate affairs director Andrew Brown said he believed the government wanted to keep skills in the economy and needed people to stay in work paying their taxes.

"People are living longer and there is a degree of inevitability that this will happen. If you take the print industry as an example, there are a lot of older people in the workplace," he said.

However, he warned that this could mean it will be more difficult to recruit younger people into the industry if there are large numbers of older staff.

"Planning will be more difficult if you don't know when people will retire and this could impact on the recruitment of young people," he said.

"There could also be concerns if a person's performance starts to deteriorate once they get to a certain age. It all throws up quite a lot of issues for employers and the government needs to come up with practical guidance."

The government plans to abolish the default retirement age as of October 2011, with a six-month transition phase from the existing regulations taking place from April 2011.

Individual employers will still be able to operate a compulsory retirement age, providing that they can objectively justify it.