MPs have suggested giving recruitment agencies greater responsibility for collecting age data after a report published by the Women and Equalities Committee found that there were over 1 million people aged 50 or over who are out of work but willing to work.

The report stated, “We want to see recruitment agencies accept greater responsibility, collecting data on where older workers are being excluded and developing a plan of action to remove discrimination from the recruitment process.”

It added that, since transparency is being used with some success to challenge discrimination in other areas such as the gender pay gap, it could also be extended to older workers via the reporting of age profiles for workforces.

The report said that the government and the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC) are not doing enough to enforce the law and say they “must be clearer that prejudice, unconscious bias and casual ageism in the workplace are all unlawful under the Equality Act 2010”.

“Too little is being done to enforce the law,” the report stated. “Neither the Government or EHRC with its considerable enforcement powers, are intervening in the recruitment sector where so much of the evidence demonstrates unlawful ways of working. The public sector struggles to retain older workers when it should be leading the way, but the EHRC is not investigating whether the public sector equality duty is being met. We want it to do so.”

But Richard Woodman, head of employment law at Royds Withy King, told The Independent that the suggestion to have recruitment agencies collect age data was “unusual to say the least”.

“Recruitment agencies, like all employers, need to operate within the current laws, and we do not believe they are best placed or indeed the right businesses to police workplace discrimination” Woodman said. “If the committee wished to see meaningful change it would be better to perhaps call on the government to introduce a mandatory reporting requirement for businesses over a certain size, as it has done with gender pay gap reporting.”

The Centre for Ageing Better also responded to the report and called on UK employers to ensure they have more age-friendly employment policies and practices.

"The UK workforce is changing - and employers need to catch up,” Patrick Thomson, Centre for Ageing Better’s lead on age-friendly employment, said. “Improving policy and practice, tackling age bias and creating an age-friendly workplace culture is vital to ensuring that people can work for as long as they want to."

"Employers who don’t make these changes will be left behind,” Thomson said. “This matters for older workers, and younger workers, who mostly expect to work longer than their parents. Without changes to our workplaces, more and more of us will face worse working lives as we age."

The report cautioned that any reduction in inward migration following the UK’s exit from the EU will also mean fewer young workers.  It added that the number of over 50s either working or available to work will grow by around one million by 2025.

Age discrimination in all its forms is against the law and, in employment, has been for more than 12 years. The UK has had a ban on age discrimination in employment since 2006. In 2010 the Equality Act brought all the different anti-discrimination laws together into a single statute, including the ban on age discrimination.