Older Workers: Job Market Opportunities

Baroness Barker Excerpts

Thursday 3rd March 2022 Grand Committee

[Baroness Barker (LD)]

My Lords, it is a great pleasure to take part in this debate on a subject to which I first had to pay attention in the run-up to the millennium, when the organisation for which I was quite a young worker at the time, Age Concern, held a “debate of the age”, looking strategically at big questions to do with an ageing society. One of the advisers to that was the then Ros Altmann, and the driving force and inspiration behind it was the then Sally Greengross. It is a delight, 20 years on, that they are still taking the fight on this subject.

I am glad that we had the very informative briefings from the Library and the Centre for Ageing Better. I found a paper that I think crystallised the issues and speaks in many ways to what the noble Earl, Lord Leicester, said. The Age Smart Employer network in New York produced a paper that came up with a number of lessons for employers in recruiting and retaining older workers. One is that older people have skills and experiences that cannot be readily taught, such as critical thinking. They retain business knowledge, knowledge about networks and the historical memory of the organisations for which they work. It is absolutely true that they tend to have, on average, more technology gaps, but those can be filled and taught. To take Zoom and the House of Lords three years ago as an example, we have moved light years in a short space of time. You can learn that.

But this paper really goes to the heart of what the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, was saying: the best teams are different. They do not have groupthink; they have different skills, and sometimes that comes from different generations. One thing that older people have is an insight into customers, which is particularly important. I have in fact been to Holkham Hall, as a paying customer, and I can testify to the teamwork and atmosphere that the noble Earl, Lord Leicester, talked about.

Perhaps I was having a particularly bad bout of insomnia, because, during Covid-19, I came across one of the most informative programmes, “Farming Today”—skip the “Today” programme and go straight to that. Long before anybody else was talking about shortages of HGV drivers, “Farming Today” was talking about problems with getting milk from farms and so on.

The noble Lord, Lord Davies, is right: Covid has brought to the surface a whole load of things that many people have known about but that we have never approached in any kind of coherent fashion. There is a case for looking at sectors of work and the age profiles of people in them—and for not being afraid to take on and address some of the prejudices and what people might be shying away from in looking at that strategically.

This is a subject where we have broadly known for a long time what the causal factors are. Different Governments have brought to the table different initiatives, none of them very coherent or long term. There is a real problem, in that different Governments approach this issue differently: is it a matter of mitigating potential draws on the welfare benefits budget, is it about developing a future plan for work, is it about skills deficits or is it about the fact that we have never really—not for want of trying—got to the very heart of how we get apprenticeships to work, in terms not just of specific skills for specific jobs but of equipping young people for working life, which is something to which older people have quite a lot to contribute?

So I will go back to where I started, which was 20 years ago with the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, trying to take an informed and strategic view of this, listening to academics and doing foresight work with government, as far as was possible, to look at the changes in technology and medical science that were going to affect the health of the population. If we were to do that in the way that the noble Baroness, Lady Altmann, suggested—not as a knee-jerk reaction but really looking at what has come to the surface post Covid and at the future of work over the next 20 years, when we will not have the influxes of short-term and seasonal labour that we have had in the past—we should have a thoroughgoing look into the demographics of ageing. Apart from anything else, the big tech companies and the people behind them will have something to say on this, because they have begun to look at this area of work because they appreciate that the market of young people, which they have traditionally relied on, is perhaps now changing, and they need to look at that in a different way.

So I very much welcome the contributions in this debate, and I hope that, with the enlightened Minister that we are lucky to have in this House on this subject, we might perhaps take a step towards a new strategy for multigenerational workforces.