Older People: Their Place and Contribution in Society

Baroness Sherlock Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Sherlock]

My Lords, I, too, will join my noble friend in embarrassing the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury. I thank him for securing this debate, but more than that I thank him for his outstanding contribution to our Parliament, and indeed our country.

I, too, think that we have been blessed in having our established church led for the past decade by someone who is at once both a theologian of astonishing virtuosity and an individual of humanity who speaks and engages people with warmth, compassion and wit. His interest in, and determination to stand up for, the most marginalised in our society is an example to us all. It is possible that he might think that unoriginal; he may have got it from someone a couple of thousand years ago. Nevertheless, it is a tradition he carries on impressively.

That focus on both transcendence and immanence has been a source of inspiration to many people. I am much shallower than that. My admiration is grounded primarily in the fact that the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury remains the only Member of this House who has persuaded me of a point in conversation by quoting in some detail a scene from an episode of “The Simpsons”. I stood impressed and astounded.

I am delighted to have the chance to make a small contribution to this debate today, but having heard many noble Lords, not least the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington, I realise in my respects I am rather ill qualified to contribute. However, I do not normally allow a lack of knowledge to get in the way of sharing my opinions with the House and see no reason why today should be an exception.

In the two and a half years that I have been in the House, one thing I discovered very early on was a streak of ageism in me that I did not realise was there. I began to realise that I had got into the habit of not listening properly to older people. When I arrived here that was quickly knocked out of me, as people got up and made speeches of astonishing erudition and wisdom. In every debate in this House to which I have contributed I learned something—and often a huge amount. That is something I appreciate about being in this place: not only that we get to hear a range of views and voices that we would otherwise not get in politics, but that this is a space where we have learnt to value the wisdom of elders in a way that our wider society too often has forgotten. Perhaps all of us could think about what that means when we take it into the outside world. How do we learn to listen again to every member of our society, and to hear from them in a way in which I am afraid we have got out of the habit of doing in the “busyness” that the most reverend Primate described earlier?

We are increasingly expecting people to work longer and later, and the case was made compellingly by the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross. People will be working at least until the age of 66, and probably later; that age will no doubt recede from them, as middle age is doing to me at the moment. I grew up seeing life as being in phases: there was childhood and education, then working life and then retirement. My noble friend Lady Hollis, who would very much like to have been here today but is detained on business outside the House, talks of there now being four ages: as well as the first two, we now have early retirement and late retirement. As she points out, more and more people who retire in their late 60s or 70s will be active, will still have much to contribute and may still be working. She has made the point that that should make us think afresh about pensions planning. It is not simply about the transfer of money from working age to retirement but also, perhaps, from early retirement to later retirement. She has advocated powerfully the case, for example, for removing higher-rate tax relief on pension contributions, because the £7 billion that would be released, if ring-fenced, would pay for Dilnot twice over. I would be interested in the Minister’s view on that.

This attitude to work in later life raises some important questions for public policy, as has been mentioned. Some people do jobs that can easily be done later in life, but what happens to those who are in poor health, or who do jobs that are too tough for most people to manage later on? The Library pack for this debate, for which I am very grateful, cited research showing that productivity does not usually decline in older workers, at least until the age of 70. Given my own experience, I am astonished by that but am happy to accept it as true. I wonder if we have understood the caveat in that research; it is true provided that older people get the same training as younger workers. Can the Government tell us what they are doing to make sure that employers are encouraged to train workers at all ages and, in particular, to encourage big companies to look at members of their workforce in their 50s and think, “Could you still usefully be doing that job in 10 or 15 years’ time and, if not, can we work together to train you for other roles in the organisation which you might rather take on, so that we can retain your experience, knowledge and wisdom but think about different ways of deploying it?”?

We need also to be aware of what we will lose by pushing the retirement age so far up the scale. Many noble Lords have commented on the wonderful contribution that older people are making to our communities. They volunteer in our churches and charities and provide free childcare to their grandchildren. However, our social security system does not recognise this properly. If someone is below retirement age but does not have a job, they are required to make themselves available for work in order to receive support from the social security system. I know many active people in their early 60s who are looking after their grandchildren for two or three days a week to enable their own children to go to work. In future, if those people do not have another income, how will they still be able to do that? They will not be able to claim their state old age pension, and if they are below the official retirement age and do not have a job, the only thing open to them will be to claim what is now jobseeker’s allowance. However, to get jobseeker’s allowance you have to be available for work. Increasingly, you have to demonstrate that you are spending many of your waking hours searching for jobs if you are not actually doing one. If you are doing regular volunteering or childcare two or three days a week, I am not sure how you could demonstrate that you have met those conditions. What will then happen to volunteering, childcare and the wider contributions that we so much appreciate? One consequence of pushing older people into the labour market will be that if they are not in it we will cease properly to value the other things that they do.

Perhaps that is a problem for our social security system generally. We struggle to place an appropriate level of appreciation on something for which we cannot find a hard economic value. Perhaps that is an important lesson for all of society. It is certainly the lesson that I took from the opening contribution of the most reverend Primate. So often in society, we judge people primarily by what they do rather than by what they are. When I think of all the relationships that I have had, my beginning to learn to listen more to older people is in no way an act of charity on my part. It is a recognition that the only way that I grow is by listening to others. Every person I fail to listen to represents a lost opportunity for me, as well as a lost opportunity for them.