Older People: Their Place and Contribution in Society

Baroness Greengross Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Greengross]

My Lords, I start by thanking the most reverend Primate for choosing this issue for this debate and say what an immense privilege it is to take part.

I declare an interest as heading up a think-tank, the ILC, which looks at helping societies to plan for the future in the light of demographic change. I start by emphasising that. This is the first time in the history of mankind on the planet that we can hope to live a long time, to a great age, and that is something to celebrate. It also means that we have to change the perception of older people. We have to work towards what I would call an age-neutral society, because there will be 25% of us aged over 65 by 2035. People who retire will face about 20 years in retirement. There are great discrepancies because of where people live, their income levels and other advantages or disadvantages in life, but those are the average figures.

That all makes an enormous difference to the way we view each other when we must get used to the fact that a huge number of people around us are going to be older. It will not be something strange to look at and we will not be able to say, “Isn’t he or she old to be doing this job?”. We will just have to get used to it because life and society have changed. We also have to try hard to reduce the dreadful discrepancies. In the north-east, the average number of disability-free years for men and women is 45.3, while for those in the south it is 51.5. That is quite despicable and cannot go on.

I shall start by looking at employment. We know that there is some good news and of course the equality legislation is beginning to help, although not enough at the moment. However, 12% of older people now work, compared with 7.6% in 1993. The changes are very quick. The number of people working beyond the state retirement age has risen by 85% to nearly 1.4 million.

Many older people are self-employed. Contrary to many attitudes, those self-employed older people are much more successful, especially in setting up new businesses, than younger people. They are more reliable in coping with the finances involved and more successful in the work that they do. Some employers are now beginning to consider their older workers to be a valuable asset, but it is still very difficult for older people to get into work. It is hard, for example, to get a job when they are above 60. That is a bit illogical because research has shown that if an older worker at the age of 60 says, “I will give you five years”, he or she will do so, whereas a young person joining a workplace for the first time will probably be gone in a year or two. Given the cost of replacing and retraining people, that is a huge amount for an employer to find, so it is good to hang on to those older workers because they will repay the employer very reliably.

Because the nature of work is changing so fast, as is the whole system of how we work, it is worth training people—though this is what tends not happen in the workplace—right through their careers, even at 60-plus, because they can, contrary to many opinions, retain new knowledge and adapt their work patterns to suit the new society that we live in. That society is very conducive to older workers because much of the sort of employment that we are talking about relates to IT and does not involve a huge amount of physical hard labour. Financially, socially and economically, it makes sense to work with older people.

The most reverend Primate mentioned volunteering. We know that older people are the bedrock of many of our social community endeavours, including political parties, which could not manage without their older volunteers—no one would fill the envelopes or go around campaigning if we did not have them. Aviva recently did some work showing that today’s volunteer army provides about 104 million unpaid hours of work each week. That would be worth about £643.8 million a week at national minimum wage so that contribution, as the most reverend Primate said, is worth a huge amount to all of us and is not always recognised. A huge number of 65-plus people, 10.4 million, give up more than 10 hours a week to volunteer. This is an important part of our economy, including of course the huge contribution of older carers, very often caring for young people but also caring for people older than themselves as well as their own families.

Educational establishments have to change their attitudes towards older workers. There is the University of the Third Age and there are some wonderful progressive universities, but many colleges and universities make it quite difficult for older people to enrol, to retrain, to be involved in courses and to pay for them. We have to change our attitudes towards this and ensure that, again, we are age-neutral.

I want to mention another change of attitude that is necessary. We have to take a citizen approach to ageing. We tend to patronise older people by saying that they have contributed a lot during their working lives so now we must support them in retirement. However, it is important to have a reason for getting up in the morning, however old you are, and one of the reasons is to go on contributing and to go on being recognised as being able to contribute. We have a duty to do that for as long as we can, not always to be passive recipients of nice thoughts and kindness but to be a person, an adult, in our own right and to say that, however old we are, we must recognise our duties as citizens in society. We have a lot of entitlements but we also have duties. Perhaps we have a responsibility now to remain in the labour market for as long as we can, and older people therefore have a right to support from employers to make that possible.

We must not infantilise our older population. An age-neutral society means recognising the skills that people have and making sure that they can use them. Age should not be the reason why we stop being active in society; chronological age really tends to be irrelevant these days. Look at people’s capacity and their fitness, ability and willingness to do things. We would all benefit from this because older people are adults with a great deal to contribute and they need to be encouraged, not stigmatised, when they try to be full citizens in society. None of us wants to be patronised; that leads to infantilisation. One of the problems with saying in care systems, “Adult care plans are like this while older people’s care plans are like that”, is that we differentiate between older people and other adults. We do not stop being an adult when we reach 65; we are still adults and we go on being adults. We may not be physically fit and we may be mentally unfit, but we remain adults until we die. That is terribly important.

We need to ensure that our older population are recognised as equal contributors to society and are a mainstream part of it, and to recognise that if people are going to live for 20 years in retirement we all have to have things to do. Are those of us who are here not fortunate? We have interesting things to do, to think about and to work on every day. Let us make sure that all our older citizens have the same advantages by being recognised as serious contributors to our society.