There needs to be policies in place to allow elderly people to keep contributing, Prime Minister Lawrence Gonzi said this morning.
Closing a conference “The elderly: An asset not a liability”, organised by the European Senior Citizens Union, Dr Gonzi said that he completely agreed that the elderly were an asset.
One wrongly assumed, he said, that once people reached retirement age they did not want to be productive anymore. This was, however, not the case.
The challenge was mainly accessibility and inclusiveness and having clear policies these issues.
Dr Gonzi said there were three dimensions to accessibility - physical, intellectual and opportunity based.