By: Sir Vince Cable

There is a better way of living than the assumed dichotomy between young versus old, working versus dependent, the striving and struggling young versus enforced idleness for pensioners. We suffer from a growing divide between generations, which is reflected in social attitudes and voting patterns. We need more integrated working and living.

It has become a cliché to say that the UK is ageing. There are radical implications for employment, living arrangements, public finance and much else, including politics. In the UK, if 65 regarded as ‘old’, the share has risen from 1 in 6 (15.8%) in 1999 to 1 in 5 today (18.5) in 2019 to a projected 1 in 4 (26%) by 2050. Definitions of ‘old’ are changing of course and projections can change radically; but there is an unmistakable trend.

In fact, the world is ageing, and some countries are much more advanced in the same process. In 2017, the UK had 22% of the population over 60 but in Japan it was 33%, 29% in Italy and 28% in Germany. On expected trends, by 2050, the proportion of over-60’s will be over 40% in Japan, Korea, China, Italy and Spain, while it will still be under 25% in the UK.

Two main actors are at work: women are having fewer children and older people are living longer. There are complicating factors like immigration, which in the UK is the main factor pushing up the population from 67 million to a projected 72 million in twenty years’ time and which is also rejuvenating the population. Also, trends can be altered as when COVID has cut swathes through the older population and opiates have cut male life expectancy in the USA.

But the central policy issue is how this country adapts to having a greater share of the population who are relatively old and with a growing number who are very old. One major economic consequence is that there are fewer workers looking after more dependents. But that assumes that older people are retired and unproductive, which isn’t necessarily the case.

It is commonly assumed that there will be a growing ‘burden’ of people requiring hospital treatment and with a need for care because of conditions affecting older people like dementia. But it could also be the case that people once regarded as ‘old’ and vulnerable -say, those in their 70’s – are now fitter and healthier and economically active.

There are several reasons for believing that one of the key changes ahead is that many, perhaps most, older people work long after official retirement age. The idea of ‘working till you drop’ may no longer be seen as ‘exploitation’, but a popular choice:

1. Heavy manual work is now the exception; there are many occupations which involve sitting at a desk or light physical work.
2. Part-time work often suits employee and employer as well as the self-employed.
3. A dwindling proportion of the pensioner population has a generous final salary occupational pension, and those pensioners need to supplement their income.
4. Government has legislated against compulsory retirement and against age discrimination; so barriers to working are fewer.

We may also be entering a period of labour scarcity, especially if the government makes good on its promise to reduce immigration. Shortage occupations like truck and bus driving are increasingly taking on women in what used to be seen as a ‘man’s’ job and there are ‘youthful older people’ who could do the job too. Sensible NHS occupational planning could attract-back retired doctors and nurses on a part-time basis. Many teachers and lecturers could continue in a less onerous role. Retired police officers could come back to do back-office work, freeing up front-line roles for younger people. We see older people working in supermarkets and restaurants; and why not? There is research in German factories which shows that the highest productivity is when teams of diverse ages work together.

To make such a society work better, older workers need to be able to refresh their skills, since they lack facility in new ways of working, and update knowledge seeing as they were at school and college over half a century ago. Modern maths and science have advanced a great deal, as parents know from their children’s’ homework. The most obvious gap however is in IT. I use a laptop several hours a day but frequently must ask for help from my grandson to perform simple functions that he learnt at 6 or 7. There are millions of us who would benefit from a short, sharp, boot-camp experience, learning how to make maximum use of smart-phones and desktop computers. The place to provide this and other continuing learning is in adult colleges or modern variants. One of the most abysmal failures of governments of all parties is to fail to develop adult education. That must be reversed.

There is also a need to reconfigure the way we live. An ageing population will produce more and more older people living alone, especially widows and widowers. They are frequently isolated and lonely and seeking to manage underoccupied homes. There are, of course, many well-designed ‘sheltered housing’ developments, which enable older people to share communal facilities while living independent lives. However, the underlying premise is that older people want or need to be kept apart with other older people, bar the occasional dutiful visit from younger relatives.

There is a different model being developed in the oldest community in the oldest country in the world: Japan. Japan is literally dying out. The population is falling rapidly. The district of Akita is an extreme case, where the very old dominate the population. It has become the ‘backwater which leads the world’. Older people and young families are, where possible, integrated in mixed communities. Older people look after childcare, from baby-sitting to after-school supervision, so that parents can both work and enjoy leisure. And younger people take their turn looking after the more dependent older people. It sounds too good to be true and it assumes a sense of community as well as a degree of shared responsibility and trust, which may be more natural in Japan than the UK. But I remember the working-class communities of my childhood where ‘granny’ played that role. Can we not reinvent it?