A report in Germany's mass circulating Bild newspaper suggests that the EU will this week tell European governments to further increase state retirement ages

The EU is reported to be ready to recommend a linkage between future increases in life expectancy and state pension ages in an influential white paper due this Tuesday.

The Bild article claims that a central focus of the EU's white paper on pensions, due this Tuesday, will be to 'stabilise the balance between the years spent working and those in retirement.'

That has been widely taken by the German media as a message that Brussels sees a planned increase of the country's retirement age to 67 by 2031 as insufficient to support its ageing population.

A report from a leading German demographic research institute, the Max Planck Institute in Rostock, suggested that Germans should work until 72 by 2050 if the country's pension system is to support an increasingly ageing population.

The UK currently plans to increase retirement ages to 67 by 2028 and 68 by 2046.

While the UK pension system faces the same problems with increasing life expectancy as Germany's, its challenge is made a little easier by having a less rapidly ageing society. Projections state that the UK population will increase over the next 50 years, whereas the number of people living in Germany, with one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, is expected to decrease.

Last week UK Prime Minister David Cameron said how he admired Norway's system of linking retirement ages with life expectancy. Cameron's remarks came at the same conference at which the Swedish Prime Minister said his countrymen should consider working until 75, an idea that outraged the Swedish public.

A proposal of further increasing retirement ages in Europe is politically sensitive in the middle of the financing problems that many EU governments are facing.

Last year former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi resigned in order to push through a deeply unpopular increase in retirement ages in Italy to 67 by 2026.

It is reported that the EU report will also advocate abolishing "unjustified early retirement arrangements." It is unclear as yet what impact that could have on civil servants who retire early, or if the EU is taking aim at some member states who have given various workers early access to state pensions when made redundant.

dbillingham@wilmington.co.uk