By: Tina Woods, Lansons Health & Eric Khilstrom, KareInn

This blog is one in a series of blogs on the Future of Ageing, published in the lead up to the ILC-UK Future of Ageing conference on the 24th November. To register to attend this conference, click here.

“The first person to reach the age of 135 has already been born, but it is wrong to think that we can take the life stories of our parents and grandparents as a blueprint for the way our own lives should unfold” according to Rudi Westendorp, an expert on geriatric medicine who has just written a book “Growing Older without Feeling Old”.

New developments in our understanding of the biological determinants of ageing and better healthcare are behind the growing life expectancy (80 now from 40 a century ago). But socially and culturally we have not kept pace with what this will mean in our ageing society of the future.What do longer life spans mean for the way we organise our societies? How can people best prepare themselves for living considerably longer?

These are all questions that society and government are asking themselves now. In the UK the system for elderly care is broken and what it means to grow old looks bleak. Our social care services and NHS simply cannot keep up with the growing demands of a growing older population. This is a key reason why the recent Innovate UK challenge focused on long term care, asking for a “revolution” and not an “evolution” of the current model of care for our senior citizens.

Yet the living wage shows there is not joined up thinking in Government. The long term care sector is experiencing serious threats with the new living wage recently announced which will be potentially catastrophic for the elderly population most in need of long term care. Government thinking needs to understand cause and effect better in addressing the huge crisis we have in looking after an ageing population. Why? Because staff costs on average represent about 60% of the cost base for a care home and most care workers would qualify for the living wage meaning that care home operators will need to foot the bill (with 700,00 workers likely to be eligible this will cost care providers up to £2 billion alone)- at a time when funding has been cut by about 20% between 2010 and 2014 (source: Age UK) and local authorities have been reducing rather than increasing the fees paid for elderly care according to a recent Deloitte report.

Where will local councils find the extra £2 billion? Before Osborne’s announcement it was estimated that about 800,000 people need formal care but are not currently receiving it- but this care gap will only increase after the living wage sets in. Maybe Osborne and others in Government are setting up a larger discussion about how we care for our older citizens.

Crucially, the tone of government is that we will need to take more personal responsibility for our “old age” ahead as the state just cannot do it on its own with the ticking time bomb looming of an increasingly older and ageing population. Already Jeremy Hunt has been hinting that there will need to be more onus on families to care for elderly relatives with them moving into the family home rather than a care home- and recent “Nannies for grannies” headlines have been appearing in the press.

The elderly population will need to retire later to meet the growing demands of taking more personal responsibility. This could be enabled by more flexible or part time working hours for the elder generation but this will require a change towards the role of older generations in society.

Massive disruption in thinking and joining up the dots is clearly needed to fix the system. Leadership is required from government, business and a myriad of other stakeholders and a cross industry view is needed to explore the opportunities to completely redefine what people want from services as they go through their journey of ageing and how to pay for it.