United Kingdom: Future Demographic Trends

Baroness Greengross Excerpts

Thursday 14th March 2013 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Greengross]

My Lords, I congratulate the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, on initiating this debate. I listened with much interest also to the noble Lord, Lord Parekh. Looking across the world, demographic change is increasingly a reality. I declare an interest as head of the International Longevity Centre in the UK and co-president of the family of ILCs across the world—there are 14, soon to be 16, of them. I am extremely privileged to have some insight into the trends that demographic changes are bringing everywhere.

Along with everyone, I want to be able to celebrate this demographic change. It is wonderful. We can all expect to grow old, which is a new phenomenon. It has never happened before in the history of mankind. Longevity is a good thing, provided we adapt to it and change our institutions and services accordingly to meet the challenge.

I have just come back from Japan where I was working for a few days. Recently, when I was privileged to chair one of the Ditchely Park conferences, a statistician reported that statistically, actuarially, even if not realistically, it is possible to calculate when the last Japanese man or woman will live in Japan. This is because Japan has not encouraged immigration and the population is static. The Japanese have very few children, and its population is ageing more rapidly than that of any other country of the world. There is a huge warning there that we need to balance our population ageing so that we can reap its benefits and plan for the huge challenges that ageing brings with it.

Recent medical advances have been so successful that we have conquered or controlled many of the serious illnesses that used to kill people. People can go on living for a long time with chronic conditions, and therefore we have the enormous challenge of dealing with the different types of dementia in all countries. Dementia is a huge challenge. This morning, I was at the dementia village at the innovations conference at ExCeL, which is looking in a novel way at innovations that enable us to live a quality of life with the different forms of dementia. That is a wonderful innovation because this is perhaps the greatest challenge that we all face. We know that one in three of us who reach old age—85 or over—will have some form of dementia, and we must prepare for that by bringing the correct services across the board to serve people who have dementia.

We have to look more widely if, across the world, we are to look positively at the ageing of the population: productive ageing. That does not mean that everybody has to be in the workplace, but it means looking at what older people bring to society. We know that various political parties in this country and in other advanced economies could not survive without the older volunteers who maintain them, particularly before elections. We know that in Africa without the older population many more children would grow up without any adult care, supervision or help because of the ravages of AIDS. We know that in many countries, you still do not talk about a retirement age but go on working until you die because there is no such thing as retirement and an awful lot of people depend on your activity for their livelihood. Whatever age you are, you depend on the older population for much of your welfare and productivity.

Ageing is not a disaster, it is a triumph, but in this country and elsewhere we have to adapt very fast if we are to keep up with the change. That means looking across the board, as the noble Lord, Lord Hodgson, insisted. For example, we have not designed our built environment, our housing and our homes adequately for an ageing population. Transport has not come to terms with the fact that the travelling public will rapidly become much older than they are now. On education, with adequate IT or television, perhaps in your own home or in the village community centre, you can watch a lecture given by the leading professor of whatever subject you are studying. Why do we retain absolute age identities when we are learning? Why cannot a 14 year-old and a 64 year-old learn a language or history together? Why do we segregate people ruthlessly according to their age? It is of another era.

We should look again at our education, as we look at employment. We must bring the skills and experience of older people into the workforce along with the innovatory ideas and new approaches of the young. We must encourage multi-generational working and all forms of education. We must realise that older people can learn, retrain and adapt as our retirement ages increase, and can continue to work much later in life. We must design our buildings and places of work accordingly. There must be much more flexible working and cleverly designed buildings and methods of working to cope with the ageing of the population.

There is an ethical imperative to address the ageing issue correctly and to work so that, in all industrialised countries, we sort out the imperatives of adequate pensions and benefits. We realise that the ageing of society is changing everything.

Today, the excellent report from the committee chaired by the noble Lord, Lord Filkin, is published. It looks at some of the challenges posed by an ageing population in this country. We know that, as yet, we do not have the cohesive approach to ageing that we need. Governments still work in silos. We still do not bring the different systems together. I hope that the draft Care and Support Bill—for which I have been pleased to work on the pre-legislative scrutiny—will help if we have government support to bring things together so that we are not separating healthcare, social care and housing in the way that has happened up until now. It is only with a co-ordinated approach, difficult as it is with the legal responsibilities of different departments, that we can tackle that. If we do not, we will not meet the challenge of an ageing population. We have the opportunity to do it now, and we can.

With the best will in the world, the Government are now making encouraging efforts to co-ordinate care under the banner of well-being and outcomes. Other Governments across Europe and beyond are doing the same thing. It is a marvellous moment for us to celebrate the ageing of the population. If all countries together get this right, we can celebrate and be delighted that we can all hope to live to a great age.