By 2030, there will be over 20 million older people in the UK

Baroness Ros Altmann is an economist and leading expert on pensions, pension investments, later life finance and social care. She is a consultant and policy adviser on all aspects of pensions and policy for older generations.

For many years, Ros has championed pension fairness and highlighted financial injustice, including spearheading a successful campaign to help 150,000 people receive compensation when their occupational pension schemes collapsed. Her work was instrumental in setting up the system of UK pension protection.

She appears regularly in the media and writes and comments on economics, pensions, later life and consumer matters. Ros has won numerous industry awards, including Pensions Personality of the Year (twice), Industry Guru of the Year, Women in Public Life Award and Lifetime Achievement in Pensions. From 2010 to 2013, Ros was Director General of over-50s specialists Saga, where she advised the Dilnot Commission review of social care funding.

Ros was awarded national honours with a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours in 2014 for services to Pensioners and Pension Provision, she was the UK Government’s Business Champion for Older Workers from 2014 to 2015 and then Minister of State for Pensions from 2015 to 2016.

She is a visiting professor at LSE and sits as a Conservative Peer in the House of Lords. She has advised Governments, the financial services industry, pension funds and charities on policy issues.

Her career has covered all aspects of pensions, from state pensions, pensioner poverty and retirement policy to pension fund investing, managing and running pension schemes. Initially working as an academic analysing occupational pensions and pensioner income, she then began a City career as a pension fund asset manager. She ran the international equities investment operations at Chase Manhattan Bank, London and was a Director at N.M. Rothschild and then at NatWest. After she had her third child, Ros set up her own consultancy to advise Governments and the industry.

She is an adviser to many different charities and volunteers for her local community.

Dr Brian Beach joined University College London (UCL) in July 2021 in the Department of Epidemiology and Public Health. His current work uses data from the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, with a focus on social connections and dementia.

Prior to UCL, Brian worked for eight years at the International Longevity Centre UK (ILC), where he conducted research on a range of topics related to population ageing, such as loneliness, serious illness, and retirement housing, with his main expertise related to employment in later life. He has worked in the field of ageing since 2006 and has been an active member on various strategic and advisory groups with universities, the voluntary sector, and government as they examine older people and the world of work. His engagement with the UK Parliament included three appearances before Select Committees, providing oral evidence on employment in later life and housing for older people.

Brian received his doctorate in 2016 from the University of Oxford, studying at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, where he explored how the concept of employability plays a role in the labour market behaviour of older workers in England and other European social policy contexts. Prior to this, he worked in the International Affairs office of AARP in Washington, DC, where he helped organise a number of international dialogues and conferences on issues related to population ageing. His work also included fostering AARP’s on-going collaboration with the United Nations Programme on Ageing, conducting outreach among the diplomatic and research communities.

Prior to his position at AARP, he completed the TransAtlantic Masters Program in Political Science through the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and L’Università degli Studi di Siena, Italy. Through this programme, he gained extensive knowledge on European Union institutions, the process of European integration, and European welfare states. He speaks French and Italian, with varying competence in Danish, German, and Spanish.

Dr Craig Berry is a Research Fellow at the Sheffield Political Economy Research Institute, University of Sheffield, where he conducts research and analysis on growth and economic rebalancing. Previously he worked at the Trades Union Congress as Pensions Policy Officer, HM Treasury as a Policy Advisor on State Pensions and Older People, the International Longevity Centre-UK as Head of Policy and Senior Researcher, and the University of Warwick as Lecturer on economic policy.

He completed his PhD at the University of Sheffield in 2008 and his book ‘Globalisation and Ideology in Britain’ was published in 2011. He is also the author of a large number of reports, articles and think-pieces on a wide range of subjects, including economic policy, pensions, financial services, employment, social care, young people and politics, older drivers, and the information society.

David Blane is a professor emeritus of Imperial College London, professorial research associate of University College and a former (2008-2012) deputy director of ESRC International Centre for Life Course Studies in Society and Health – ICLS, which specialises in secondary analysis of quantitative longitudinal data, bridging the social and biological sciences and international comparative research with colleagues in mainland Europe and Asia.

His academic background lies in medicine, sociology and public health. His interests include health inequalities, social gerontology and life course research, with current emphasis on the health and social implications of raising the state pension age.

Clive’s career as a gerontologist has included 15 years as consultant physician in the West Country where he had the opportunity to develop a number of service innovations. His work with several charities and a PLC led to a transition to become medical director of care services for Bupa. He has been a contributor to the work of learned societies, charities, colleges and various reports by national bodies.

Throughout his career he has contributed to conferences and written extensively. From the early 1980’s he has observed and reported principally on care homes and the care home population. Presently an honorary visiting professor to City, University of London he chairs Invatech Health an innovative software company concerned with medicines management in pharmacies and care, is a NED to AKARI care a care home operator and occasionally undertakes consultancy.

Jim was appointed CEO of the Equity Release Council in June 2018. He joined from Reform think tank, where he was Deputy Director and Head of Research. Prior to this he was an Expert Adviser at the Department for Work and Pensions, initially supporting Lord Freud, then Welfare Reform Minister.
Jim has extensive experience of retirement and social care funding having led the Corporate Affairs functions at specialist life assurers Britannic Retirement Solutions, Just Retirement and Partnership Assurance.

Jim has directed successful campaigns which have resulted in strong consumer outcomes from the regulation of reversionary equity release schemes to ensuring a duty is placed on local authorities to direct citizens who need care to financial advice. He was the pro-bono public affairs adviser to the Save Bart’s Patients Campaign, credited with saving one of the UK’s most valued medical centres of excellence.
Jim is a former tax and trusts lawyer.

Stephen Burke is CEO of Hallmark Care Homes Foundation, which focuses on ageing well and improving care, and Hemraj Goyal Foundation, which empowers children, young people and women to tackle disadvantage. Previously he has been CEO and chair/trustee of various care, family, housing and ageing charities. Stephen has also been a leader in local government and the NHS, as a councillor and board member of various trusts in London and Norfolk. He is co-founder and director of intergenerational think-do tank, United for All Ages. Stephen co-founded the Campaign to End Loneliness and the Good Care Guide and led mergers to create the Family Mediation Trust and Grandparents Plus.

Paul Cann has led a range of voluntary organisations for nearly 30 years, initially heading charities for children and young people with disabilities, and then for the last 17 years charities promoting the interests of older people, as senior Director at Help the Aged and then Chief Executive of Age UK Oxfordshire. Before that he taught for several years, then worked as a civil servant at the Cabinet Office, including a posting as Private Secretary to the Arts Minister, and that was followed by a stint in the private sector including a senior management role at the newspaper ‘The Independent’.

His campaigning work has included the tackling of pensioner poverty, working for improvements in pension provision and financial entitlement; as part of that drive he initiated and co-edited in 2009 the Policy Press publication and a linked series of campaigning events on ‘Unequal Ageing: the untold story of exclusion in older age”. From 2000 onwards, starting with the influential initiative ‘Dignity on the Ward’, he led work to challenge the frequent lack of dignity in care, and in 2006 he launched the national ‘Dignity in Care’ campaign jointly with the then Care Minister. From 2004 to 2007 he was Visiting Fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing. Help the Aged’s work on the poor treatment of older people culminated in securing the outlawing of unfair age discrimination through the Equality Act 2010, and its campaign work won five national awards. In 2008 he received the medal of the British Geriatrics Society for an outstanding contribution to the interests of older people. From 2009 for six years he chaired the UK-wide Policy Panel of Age UK bringing together the policy positions of 170 Age UKs across the four nations.

In 2011 he was co-founder of the Campaign to End Loneliness, and he remains a member of its strategic Management Group. He is a charter member of the charity Independent Age and an Associate of the International Longevity Centre. In 2016 he was invited by the Australian Association of Gerontology to be their International Visiting Fellow. Paul’s recent focus has been on the role of creative arts in later life, and this included the commissioning and performance of a pioneering choral work ‘The Voyage’ dedicated to the Campaign to End Loneliness on the universal theme of journeying through life and loneliness, which brought younger and older people together to make music.

He is a Board member and Chair of the award-winning community arts enterprise Entelechy Arts, Chair of the community singing initiative Sound Resource, and Chair of the Rodolfus Foundation (“inspiring tomorrow’s singers”), which works to enable children and young people from all backgrounds to achieve excellence in choral music. His special interest is the impact of participation in creative arts on health, well-being and loneliness.

Paul was appointed OBE in the new Year’s Honours List of January 2020.

Biography to come shortly.

After graduating in Medicine from the University of Leeds, Roger Francis developed a major clinical and research interest in bone disease, whilst working as a member of the Clinical Scientific Staff at the Medical Research Council Mineral Metabolism Unit at Leeds General Infirmary. He was subsequently awarded a Travelling Fellowship, which allowed him to spend a year working on the cellular mechanisms of bone breakdown in St. Louis, USA.

He then worked as Honorary Lecturer in Geriatric Medicine at University College, London, before moving to Newcastle in 1986, initially as a Senior Lecturer. He is now Emeritus Professor of Geriatric Medicine at the Institute of Cellular Medicine at Newcastle University, where he continues his research into vitamin D and bone disease in older people.

He served as Editor-in-Chief of Age and Ageing from 2007-2014. He was awarded the Dhole-Eddleston Prize by the British Geriatrics Society in 2014, in recognition of his contribution to the literature on the medical care of older people.

Jenny Head is Professor of Medical and Social Statistics at University College London in the research department of Epidemiology and Public Health. She is PI on the renEWL (Research into Extending Working Lives) research consortium which is analysing several UK and European longitudinal studies to investigate determinants of being in paid work up to and beyond state pension age.

Other projects include co-PI of the cross-national collaborative IDEAR (Integrated Datasets in Europe for Ageing Research ) network, the aim of which is to investigate how determinants in later working life, during the retirement transition, and in early retirement influence for how long older individuals are able to live actively and healthily; and senior investigator on the Whitehall II study, a longitudinal study with data collection spanning over 30 years from a cohort of civil servants recruited in 1985.

Her research interests include health inequalities and determinants of healthy ageing and healthy life expectancy.

Professor Andrew King is Deputy Head of the Department of Sociology, University of Surrey, UK where he also co-directs the ‘Centre for Research on Ageing and Gender’ (CRAG). His research has mainly focused on ageing amongst lesbian, gay, bisexual and trans (LGBT) people. Andrew has published widely in this field: in books, journal articles and edited collections. Recent books include: Lesbian, Gay and Bisexual Adults: Identities, Intersections and Institutions (Routledge 2016), Older LGBT People: Minding the Knowledge Gaps (Routledge, 2018) and Intersections of Ageing, Gender and Sexualities: Multidisciplinary International Perspectives (Policy Press, 2019).

Andrew’s LGBT research has been funded by the ESRC, local government and housing associations. Andrew is project lead of CILIA-LGBTQI+ which is comparing intersectional life course inequalities amongst LGBTQI+ citizens in four European countries and is funded by the Norface consortium of European research councils. Andrew is also an associate editor of the journal ‘Ageing and Society’ and has previously edited ‘Sociology’, the journal of the British Sociological Association.

Simonetta Longhi is a Professor at the Department of Economics of the University of Reading. She is also Research Fellow of IZA, the German Institute for the Study of Labor and external fellow of the Centre for Research and Analysis of Migration (CReAM). Before joining the University of Reading she was Research Fellow at the Institute for Social and Economic Research of the University of Essex.

Her interests include differences over the life course in economic and social outcomes and in wellbeing across groups, especially by gender, ethnicity and disability. She has published research on wage disparities across individuals and across regions; on job search behaviour and on occupational change.

Jill Manthorpe is Professor of Social Work and Director of the Health and Social Care Workforce Research Unit at King’s College London. This Unit receives core funding from the Department of Health and other research commissioners across government and the third sector.

Current workforce research includes studies of personal budgets, adult safeguarding, dementia care, workforce regulation, carers’ workers and gambling. Recently completed studies by the Unit have covered international (migrant) workers, social work education, agency workers, risk and analysis of the National Minimum Data Set for Social Care.

Jill is also a Senior Investigator of the NIHR, a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences and a Trustee of the Centre for Policy on Ageing and the Orders of St John Care Trust.

Stuart started as the Head of Longevity and Demographic Insights at LCP in October 2022. In this role he will develop the firm’s longevity expertise, helping clients estimate the lasting impacts of the pandemic on mortality, population morbidity and inequalities, within the DB pensions market and the health care sector.

In his previous role as Head of Demographic Assumptions and Methodology for Lloyds Banking Group, his multi-disciplinary team were responsible for the assumptions about policyholder health and behaviour used for pricing, risk management and valuation of life insurance, pensions and annuity policies.

Stuart joined Lloyds in 2014 and built the longevity team which supported Scottish Widows’ launch into the Bulk Annuity market. Previously he held a variety of commercial and technical roles with insurers and reinsurers.

Stuart is a Fellow of the Institute of Actuaries and a Chartered Enterprise Risk Actuary. He plays an active role within the actuarial profession, currently serving on the Executive Committee of the Continuous Mortality Investigation. Early in 2020 he founded and co-chairs the COVID-19 Actuaries Response Group.

Charlotte Moore is a freelance journalist and communications consultant who has specialised in writing about pensions for the past 15 years. She contributes regularly to various specialist magazines such as Professional Pensions, IPE as well as the Pensions and Lifetime Saving Association’s quarterly magazine, Viewpoint. She blogs regularly about pensions on her website to explain how the UK’s pension landscape evolved and what challenges need to be addressed. She also contributes regularly to Times Radio’s Early Breakfast show reviewing the day’s business stories. She works with asset managers and consultancies to improve their external communications.

Communications is her second career; her first job after graduating from the University of Bristol with a degree in Chemistry was working as investment analysts covering the pharmaceutical sector. She has over 25 years either working in or closely observing the financial sector, with a deep understanding of how institutional investors, like pension schemes, operate.

Dr Jackie Morris qualified at St Mary’s Hospital Medical School in 1971 and then completed her preregistration, general medical and higher medical training at St Mary’s Hospital, Hillingdon, Central Middlesex and University College Hospitals. She had always wanted to be a Geriatrician having been very disappointed and shocked by the way older people were treated in acute hospitals.

She has been a Consultant Geriatrician since 1979 when she was appointed to St Mary’s Hospital Paddington. She moved to the Royal Free Hospital in 1985. She was Frohlich visiting Professor at The University of California at Los Angeles in 1986 and seconded to the Department of Health between 1992-1994. Throughout her career she has worked to improve care for older people and has run campaigns on Dignified care for older people as British Geriatrics Society Dignity Champion. While Vice President of the Patients Association she worked on a Gold Standard for care in hospital and a Care home Charter for swallowing and Medicines. She is concerned about the NHS post code lottery for health care in care homes. She has participated in research in care homes on end-of-life care and bowel care in care homes. She has recently published on the rehabilitation needs arising in patients who have suffered from COVID 19. She has always worked closely with the voluntary sector.

She is a Trustee of the Nightingale Hammerson Homes and a trustee of ILC.

Michael Murphy is Professor of Demography at the London School of Economics and Political Science. He is a Fellow of the British Academy, member of the Office for National Statistics Expert Academic Advisory Panel for Population Projections, and chairs the Scientific Advisory Board of the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research.

His main areas of research include: family, kinship and household demography; ageing; social and genetic mechanisms for the inheritance of behaviour; mathematical and statistical demography; methods of making and evaluating population and household forecasts. Recent publications include work on mortality crises in Russia; models for mortality forecasting in elderly populations; and intergenerational transfers between parents and children.

Professor Ian Philp is the founder of Age Care Technologies (ACT) www.agecaretechnologies.org. ACT is the winner of the 2021 United Nations WSIS prize for innovation in healthy ageing for our potential to add 100 million quality life years for older people and reduce global costs of long-term care by $45 trillion.

Profession Philp is an advisor to the World Health Organisation in person-centred care for older people. He holds a Doctorate in Medicine from the University of Edinburgh and was a practicing physician for 35 years in the UK National Health Service, spending eight years an Executive Medical Director.

As Professor of Health Care for Older People at the University of Sheffield, he led teams which won the UK hospital team of the year in the care of older people and the Queen’s Anniversary Prize for Higher Education for research into improving the quality of life of older people.

From 2000-8, he was the National Clinical Director for Older People in England, leading the development and implementation of the National Service Framework for Older People, campaigning to ensure respect for dignity in care and eliminate age discrimination, leading national strategies for intermediate care, stroke, dementia and the prevention of falls and fractures.

Professor Philp was awarded a CBE in the Queen’s birthday honours in 2009 in recognition of his work to improve the lives of older people.

Founder of Thorp Coaching and CoFounder of the Diverse Directors Programme; Emma is an Executive Coach, Advisor and Consultant with a deep knowledge and network within Life Science and Technology sectors.

Previously Emma held pivotal roles, including Chief Commercial Officer and Board Member at a global Life Science Executive Search and Recruitment Business. She had also founded Thorp Associates, a successful Consulting and Search business, which was acquired in 2020.

In 2022 Emma moved away from her Corporate career to focus her time on Executive coaching and NED development. Emma is driven by a passion for fostering growth and empowerment.

Inspired by the transformative power of nature, she advocates for reconnecting individuals with joy and creativity, recognising these as catalysts to unlock full potential within organisations.

Emma is an advocate for neurodiversity, proudly embracing her ADHD and Dyslexia. She is most fulfilled when championing diverse leaders, empowering them to harness their unique strengths and unleash their superpowers.

Jackie is an independent strategy and policy consultant who works primarily in pension and financial services sectors. She has worked on a diverse range of consultancy projects for the FSA / FCA, Government departments and other not-for-profit organisations as well as a number of commercial businesses. Her work has ranged from considering the implications of changes to pension taxation for pension schemes and members to exploring the subject of consumer responsibility in financial services markets.

Jackie has previously worked as head of policy at PLSA/NAPF and in Deloitte’s consultancy team where she worked with the DWP on the Pensions Commission reforms as well as with providers and schemes on the impact of auto-enrolment. She has previously led the strategy team at Bacon & Woodrow and in similar roles at other consultancies and life companies.

Jackie is also a director of Age UK Southampton and is a member of Age UK’s public policy panel.