FURTHER to B Dagger's letter about pensions. Nobody even mentions the number of years that a person pays into the NHS and their pension rights. Everybody looks at the age of retirement.

There are a lot of people who started their working lives at 15 or even earlier, and who are now on the brink of formal retirement.

I, like they, have paid into the NHS (social payments) without missing a week since I was 15 years and five weeks old. Currently a period of over 47 years.

Those who went to university or did not actually start employment until they were over 25 years of age will never work longer than 40 years at the current retirement age level.

So why not base the retirement age on when a person started working and how many years they have actually worked (or made social payments).

This would probably mean that those manual workers who started at 16 or even 17 should retire first and the doctors and professors will have to work until they are at least 72!

Let's base the retirement age on actual working lives.

S ALLEN, Patersdorf, Germany.