I’ve seen the future and it’s grey
Allister Heath reports on the remarkable number of pensioners starting work again, and celebrates the fading of an artificial finishing line When Benjamin Franklin remarked that all would live long, but none would be old, he could hardly have known how apt a description of today’s pensioners this would turn out to be. Fitter, healthier and more in tune with the times than any previous generation, they are determined not to allow their age to hold them back.
For the lucky few, including many babyboomers, the first of whom are turning 60 this year, this means spending their golden years trekking in the Himalayas, dunebashing in Dubai and generally showing us youngsters up as the lazy, unadventurous bunch we really are; for others it means something even more radical but usually less exotic — going back to work. Like Sydney Prior, a sprightly 91-year-old who still chooses to work five days a week at the B&Q garden centre in Wimbledon, south-west London — and who has long been a hit with shoppers — pensioners are increasingly refusing to retire.
For some, to continue working is a choice; for others it is a financial necessity. In the past six months alone, a record 60,000 pensioners started working again, a highly significant but almost completely overlooked development which heralds the death of retirement as we have known it. Such has been their rush into jobs, and the enthusiastic response from employers, that pensioners accounted for 85 per cent of the employment growth in Britain during that time.
This is an astonishing change, one which coincides with profound cultural shifts in the attitudes of younger people towards work and a dramatic ageing of the population. It is a well-kept secret that the British generally work far fewer hours than they did as recently as a decade ago. For all Chancellor Gordon Brown’s belief in the redemptive power of work, and his all-toopredictable boast in his Budget about Britain’s officially rock-bottom unemployment, the sorry truth is that his tax increases and huge expansion of the welfare state have robbed hundreds of thousands of people of the incentive to get a job, increasing the number of people in receipt of benefits and out of work to 5.3 million. Meanwhile, Brown’s public-sector recruitment drive and propensity to tie up all that moves with red tape have seen a publicsector culture hostile to the spirit of enterprise contaminating much of the private economy, with deleterious effect. The demise of the work ethic has played into the hands of youngish professionals in their late twenties and early thirties who have been brought up on psychological mumbo-jumbo and day-time TV. Most of my generation enjoy nothing better than feeling sorry for themselves, having a moan about jobs and generally plotting to drop out of the rat race to go backpacking around the world.
Fortunately, just as the desire to work appears to be waning among the young, the oldies are taking up the slack, returning to work in droves. Over the past year the numbers working past state-pension age have soared by 107,000 to reach more than 1.1 million. For the first time in many years the number of younger, British-born workers has begun to fall; meanwhile, one in ten pensioners are now working, as are ever greater numbers of migrant workers from around the world. Without the help of Britain’s grey army and foreign legions, Brown would have less to boast about on Budget day; indeed, employment in Britain would almost certainly be in free fall.
For many of those who are going back to work, such as John Harvey, 80, who is employed at a Sainsbury’s store in Islington, north London, it is a lifestyle choice or, as he puts it, ‘retirement is great, but having worked hard during my working life I couldn’t just sit still’. But for many other pensioners who have been hit by a triple whammy of poor pension payouts, surging council tax and much higher utility and insurance bills — the first two courtesy of Gordon Brown — going back to work is something they must do to survive.
The Chancellor’s single greatest act of vandalism in his almost nine years in office has been his wanton destruction of Britain’s private retirement industry. By slapping a massive tax on pension funds, now worth £7.3 billion a year, he has helped to turn the best private retirement industry in Europe into a basket-case in perpetual crisis. Together with the adoption of European accounting rules — which make it much riskier to operate a company pension scheme — hundreds of firms have shut their final salary plans to new employees and slashed benefits to existing staff.
But regardless of whether they are returning to work out of choice or necessity, many pensioners have found employers surprisingly receptive. Attitudes have been changing. A new Manpower poll shows that more than half expect to hire more older workers. There is a new but long-overdue understanding that older people can bring unique skills, knowledge and experience to the table, especially at a time of intense shortage of good staff. One third of companies are giving school-leavers basic training in literacy and numeracy and nobody is fooled by the government’s propaganda about increasing standards any more. Businesses are all too aware that British education is in a parlous state; they are no longer prepared to pick up the bill for the government’s failure. Instead, more companies are turning to older workers.
One owner of a small business in London recently told me that he invariably found 60-year-olds with O-levels to be more literate and numerate than the average graduate. Pensioners tend also to be more articulate, better presented, and have a better attitude to work than many of today’s school-leavers or university graduates; if he could, he would recruit only Polish immigrants or British pensioners.
A few years ago B&Q opened an experimental store in Macclesfield staffed entirely by over-fifties. Fears that they would not be able to cope with shifting pots of paint were soon assuaged, and there were equally few problems with training the staff to use computers. The Macclesfield store did better than other B&Q stores in almost every way. Profits were higher by a fifth; staff turnover was six times lower; there was more than a third less short-term absenteeism; and, most remarkably of all, theft collapsed by more than half. Pensioners still face many hurdles when returning to work, but the lesson has been learnt by many other companies, including all of the large retailers. More than 2,500 over-60-year-olds now work for John Lewis. Sainsbury’s recently launched a recruitment drive targeted exclusively at the over-fifties, and plans to hire an additional 10,000 mature workers.
The old model of retirement — a product of the paternalistic company and welfare state — is well and truly over, having become financially unviable and socially undesirable. For those starting work today there will be no artificial finishing line, be it at 65 or even 75, when workers are written off. This new flexibility will transform society for the better — for example, women may be able to enjoy late-blooming careers once the nest is empty. The death of retirement will help liberate millions from the tyranny of ageing, give more people control over their lives, and allow more and better choice. We should all celebrate it.
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