Increased life expectancy and a falling birth rate across Europe present a growing challenge of demographic change in both the workplace and society.

The European Union’s response has produced a wide variety of policy initiatives. The Lisbon European Council of 2000 agreed a new strategic goal for the European Union, aimed at boosting employment, furthering economic reform and improving social cohesion in a move towards a knowledge-based economy.

It stated that the overall aim of employment and economic policies should be to raise the employment rate to 70% by 2010 and to increase the proportion of women in employment to 60% by 2010. Following on from that, the Stockholm European Council of 2001 agreed to ‘set an EU target for increasing the average EU employment rate among older women and men (55–64 years) to 50% by 2010’ (with a target rate of 40% for women).

The 2002 Barcelona European Council reinforced the Stockholm target by concluding that ‘a progressive increase of about five years in the effective average age at which people stop working in the European Union should be sought by 2010’.

The Lisbon, Stockholm and Barcelona targets are enshrined in the European Employment Strategy, which aims to ‘create more and betterjobs’. The general aim is to increase labour market participation for all groups of workers and to reduce inequalities, including those relating to age. The new employment strategy explicitly includes promoting active ageing in the sense of increasing labour force participation and facilitating employment for more years.

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