Professor Lynda Gratton, Professor Wendy Loretto and Professor Philip Taylor.

Q86 The Chair: Welcome to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee’s sixth evidence session on our inquiry into preparing for an ageing society. Welcome to our witnesses, who I am sure will be excellent. We have Professor Lynda Gratton, professor of management practice at London Business School. Online, we have Professor Wendy Loretto, professor of organisational behaviour at the University of Edinburgh Business School, and Professor Philip Taylor, professor at the Warwick Institute for Employment Research. You are all very welcome and thank you for your time.

I should say that this session is being broadcast live on parliamentlive.tv and you will be given a full transcript after the session, so that you can make any corrections that you feel are appropriate.

Can I just start by asking you a general overview question? What do you see as the main trends in employment for the over-50s in the UK? What would you highlight as the trends worthy of note? In particular, are there any things that are striking, perhaps unique or unusual, compared to other countries or recent developments that you would like to draw our attention to?

Professor Lynda Gratton: Thank you so much for inviting me today. It is a very important conversation that we are having today. Philip and I take rather different perspectives in terms of our background, so we are going to have a great conversation here. My interest in general is in work and careers. I research careers.

What is very striking in terms of careers is that people are living longer—at least, some people are—and that affects their career. Andrew Scott, who is an economist, and I, as a psychologist, wrote about this in two books: The 100-Year Life and The New Long Life. The economics of a longer life are that, unless you have saved—and most people have not—you need to work longer. The economics of work, given longevity, is one very important trend.

The second issue around that is that there is significant variety within age cohorts in terms of their experiences, their health and so on. That makes government policy very difficult. I have a great deal of sympathy for policymakers, because one can make policy for one group that is entirely inappropriate for another group.

There are two other points I would make with regard to the big trends. We are beginning to see a change in the way that people think about their careers. Historically, a career or a working life would have been seen as three stages: full-time education, full-time work and full-time retirement. We are beginning to see what Andrew and I called a multistage working life, where people move in and out of the labour market at different points, perhaps to learn, to take time off, to change the way they work.

Then the final trend—and this is my final point—is the rise of the freelancer. Historically, people would have seen work as something that happens in a company. You start at a certain age; you work all the time; you leave. We would have seen gig work as being rather something that people do not want. I and a colleague of mine have written extensively about this, and what we have seen is the rise of people who are quite skilled, in some cases, preferring to be freelancers. Of course, this brings a great deal more flexibility into their working life. Those would be my main trend highlights.

Professor Wendy Loretto: I would partly agree with some of the things that Professor Gratton said and maybe offer some slight differences. One of the key aspects is undoubtedly longevity, and not just life expectancy, but healthy life expectancy. The average healthy life expectancy now falls below the age of retirement. While absolutely our lives are getting longer, they are not getting longer while we are healthy. That, for me, is one of the shocking statistics, albeit, as Professor Gratton said, there are a lot of differences.

Health is one of the main issues. I looked at the transcript of the previous session where you had the Centre for Ageing Better and IES speaking. You spoke a lot about health. One of the statistics that prompted our research in supporting healthy ageing at work is that, of the people over 50 who leave work before they want to or should, 24% do so because of unsupported health needs. I would endorse the previous evidence on health being a real driver.

I completely agree with Professor Gratton about the role of self-employment. This has been the growth area of employment in the over-50s. The UK does stand out. We are the highest in OECD countries in the growth of self-employment of over-50s. In fact, the median age of all self-employed workers is now 50. That is definitely the older workforce. Half of those are educated to at least degree level and very few have no formal qualifications at all. That is certainly a trend area that is worth watching.

As part of our supporting healthy ageing at work study, we focused on a group of self-employed and the pathways to self-employment are, of course, very varied. Some choose it because of flexibility, but it is fair to say that more are forced to choose it because of the lack of flexibility or support within their previous organisations or employment. I can go into more detail about that later, if the committee is interested.

Professor Philip Taylor: I might come back to the self-employment thing a little later on, because it is a really interesting topic. Maybe I could say something a bit different about trends. I have been working in this field since the late 1980s. I am interested in looking at the history of older workers and their participation. What strikes me a lot, looking at the statistics, is how little progress, in a sense, we have made over the last 40 years.

There have been relatively modest increases in male participation between the ages of 55 and 64. A lot of the ageing workforce is an ageing female workforce. There has been some progress with regard to male participation, but not as much as we would have liked, when one looks at the figures. The ageing of the workforce is very gendered. There are some interesting trends you can see, none the less. A large number of people are now working past the age of 65. That is very exciting. There is positive movement around the ages of 60 and 64 in terms of upward trends, but we are not making as much progress as we ought to have done in this area.

The OECD and others have come out on many occasions and said that we have done a lot in terms of raising pension ages and so on, but we have not made enough progress. People ask questions about what has caused that and, to a large extent, it has to do with employer attitudes and behaviours, as well as the capabilities of workers, skills and so on. We have definitely made some progress, but nowhere near enough.

Q87 Lord Londesborough: Good afternoon to you all. Can we get your views and perspectives on the key factors and primary motivations behind those in their 50s and 60s deciding whether to work or to take retirement? It might be helpful if you could address, first, what I call the involuntary issues, where they really do not have any choice in the matter, and, secondly, where there is choice and it is within their control whether to continue working.

Professor Wendy Loretto: What is voluntary and what is involuntary? Like Professor Taylor, I have worked in this area for some time and that is something that we have questioned, including the blurring between those. If we take involuntary as where somebody is made redundant or forced to take early retirement, the equalities legislation has made a huge difference on this, pretty much outlawing the default retirement age.

We know that some employers still have an employer-justified retirement age and one only has to look at the case law transcripts, for example, from an employer that is not too far from us at the University of Oxford, and other employers that have gone through this, to see that it is a very acrimonious affair. Certainly, that has shown that employers are struggling to justify a retirement age, if they have one. In the main, with that and the reduction in redundancies, there has been probably a reduction in the involuntary.

That being said, the so-called voluntary is very complex. Looking at cases that go to employment tribunal, there are instances of constructive dismissal, where people feel that they have been placed in a position where they have no option but to resign, so have effectively been forced. That is from pressures of ageism still within organisations, which you might ask about later on.

Another reason for what might be seen as a voluntary exit from working, but is not necessarily always voluntary, is this very complex nexus between work, home, domestic circumstances and health again. That is not just musculoskeletal or mental health, which we know are the big two, but also the health conditions that particularly affect us as we age. Our research picked up on some of those, examples being cognitive decline, the health responsibilities of combining caring and work, as well as gendered issues, particularly menopause for women.

It is quite clear that those more hidden health issues, if you like, combine with a lack of support and do drive people out of work but, if you looked at their stated reason, they would have resigned voluntarily.

I could go on more, but I will leave that there and let my colleagues come in with their perspectives.

Professor Philip Taylor: I would very much endorse what Wendy has just said. For me, “choice” is an interesting word. Many older workers have very little choice and control over whether they work or retire, as Wendy has already alluded to. That, for me, is the crux of the problem: many workers have so little choice about working. Here I am talking about people from lower socioeconomic groups, et cetera.

We have seen public policymakers internationally pushing out the final age of exit, and there are many workers who are not going to get there and are very much struggling. Generations of public policymakers in the UK and elsewhere—I spent 15 years in Australia until very recently, and it is very similar in Australia—have focused on extending working lives through increasing retirement ages. It is happening across Europe. It is happening everywhere.

The problem is that, for many workers, working longer is just not an option. They lack the skills; they are in declining industries; they are managing health conditions and so on. The work they have been doing is often of poor quality. They would prefer to retire if they could. Many are forced to look for work, because they do not have the wherewithal to retire. We see people being in very precarious positions in the lead-up to retirement. Precarious working lives beget precarious retirements.

That, for me, is a really important message to get across. Choice, for many older workers, does not exist.

Lord Londesborough: Do we have any statistically significant national data on this, in terms of the reasons people are stopping working, perhaps by age? Is that something that the ONS or any of the employment specialists might have?

Professor Philip Taylor: Wendy may be more familiar with the more recent, up-to-date data. Of course, we know the issues with the Labour Force Survey.

Professor Lynda Gratton: The Phoenix Group has data on this, as I think you have heard. The Phoenix Group showed that there are differences between countries in Europe. The major reason it found people left work was because of their own health, they were caring for somebody else or they do not like work. If I recall—I would have to look at it again—the reason of not liking work was higher in the UK than it was in other European countries.

Lord Londesborough: This was a pan-European study.

Professor Lynda Gratton: Yes. I want to look at the other side and ask why somebody would be motivated to stay at work, rather than why they would leave. I say that because thinking about your working life is a mindset. It is about how you see your future self. This is a psychological term that we use. It is about what your possible future self could be. I would like us to help people think about a positive future self where they are working.

Why would you work over the age of 50, 60 or in my case—and maybe in some of your cases—70? The answer is that you build skills and, most importantly, you build networks and social connections. We know that loneliness is one of the reasons why people die earlier. You have a purpose and you can master something, but—here is the issue—to build a positive mindset that sees your future self as somebody who could work, you need to start early.

I had been asked by Prime Minister Abe to sit on his council in Japan on the 100-year life, which I did for some years. It was a small group of people from various walks of life. I was the only foreigner on the council. We took evidence, as you are doing today. What became very clear was that it really starts when you are young. It is about how you see the rest of your life. That is why the work I have been doing in Japan has helped people at all ages imagine that they had a long working life in a way that is very exciting and interesting for people.

For example, there are now manga books, cartoon books, about how you would live a long, working life. More recently, I have been involved in Japan where some of my work has been translated into workbooks for 14 year-olds. You cannot just suddenly spring on somebody at the age of 60, “By the way, did you know you have to work until 70?” You have to think about it right the way through your life. Younger people are beginning to do that, by the way, and that is why they want to take sabbaticals. They want to take time off. They want to be freelancers.

I say to my MBA students, “When are you going to finish work?” They know they are going to work for ever. If you are going to work for ever, you have to take breaks. It is a whole mindset. It is not just something you say to somebody at the age of 50 or 55.

Q88 Lord Turnbull: Prompted by an article circulated to us by Professor Taylor, we need to go beyond a box that says “work” and a box that says “retirement”. In the middle, there is another box. If you ask the question, “Are you working?” you will get one answer. If you say, “Are you busy?” you will get another answer. There are a lot of people who are making a choice to be busy, but they withdraw from the wage economy.

In other words, money is not changing hands and they are probably not paying tax but, in terms of worth, they are doing things that are just as worthy as working, as we conventionally define it. It could be caring, being a Scout master, working with community groups, a CAB or a food bank. There are a whole host of things we rely on that group of people to do.

If, on the other hand, lots of people choose this busy option, but outside of the economy, there are other consequences. They may be doing things that the state should be doing and is not, such as caring for older people. One thing they are not doing is paying any taxes, but they are enjoying many of the benefits. If this takes hold and lots of people move into this third box of being busy, but still claiming health benefits, healthcare, using the police, et cetera, the dependency ratio begins to become an issue.

On the one hand, this is laudable and it meets a lot of people’s choices, where they go into being busy but not working, but it brings different problems, particularly of public finances.

Professor Lynda Gratton: It is a fascinating comment.

Professor Philip Taylor: The question is, “What is work?” If people are contributing in the way that you just described, and are picking up and doing things that the state is not providing, such as caring, I would classify that as work. It may not be remunerated work, but it is work none the less.

For me, there are so many paradoxes and contradictions in all of this. We have people who need to work, but cannot find jobs, and we have people, as you have described, who could work, if they wanted to, but choose to go off and do other things. That, for me, is a conundrum. It is a huge problem, this whole debate about longer working lives. It is not something we have really grappled with enough.

I go back to my earlier comments about those who do not have the kind of choices that you are describing, joining clubs and societies, helping out, volunteering and so on. Many do, but many do not. Instead, they have the indignity or the fiction of having to look for a job, knowing full well it is highly unlikely that they will ever find one. Somehow, they are muddling through until they get to state pension age. That is hugely problematic.

Maybe my colleagues will correct me, but Governments internationally are struggling with this problem. Everyone wants people to work longer, because of the cost of social welfare, due to an ageing population, but the problem is how to get people there. We have a significant gap. Choice, for many older workers, has always been there. Many always had choices about whether to work or retire, but many do not.

Professor Wendy Loretto: First of all, to answer the question before last—it is relevant to this question—defining the main reason that people retire is difficult now, because people do not retire. That has been one of the consequences of the abolition of default retirement. We only know when people become economically inactive and then, if they never come back from that, we realise that over time. UK statistics show that 54% of people aged 50 to 54, so the younger end of the spectrum we are talking about, are economically inactive because of health. That only goes up as age goes up.

To bring it back to this question, I agree with everything that Phil has just said, but I would like to offer a slightly different perspective. If we do not just focus on the individual worker, whatever their age is or their other conditions, but look intergenerationally, we have an increasing number of over-50s either reducing their paid work or leaving paid work entirely to take up unpaid grandparenting duties. This then enables their children—very often their daughter—to work full time, when they would not otherwise do so. Therefore, the contribution to taxes, et cetera, is being paid by the next generation down.

We did quite a large study of grandparenting care and we saw this coming through very clearly. In particular, women who had young children said they were able to work, or to work full rather than part time, only because their parents were caring for their children unpaid. There is an intergenerational contract here. It is not just looking at one age group in isolation.

Professor Lynda Gratton: Can I just add to Professor Loretto’s perspective? One can look at it intergenerationally, but one can also look at the economic unit of analysis as the family, rather than the individual. I was brought up, as some of you might have been, in a family of economic specialisation. My father specialised in working; my mother specialised in caring for the family. From a tax perspective, only one person was paying tax. If you look at that per week, it meant the family was working five days a week and there were nine days a week to care.

As women entered the workforce, as they have done and now often work as much as men do, you had families where both people are paying tax. When you think not just about retirement, but about flexibility, one also has to bring that into it. Women now pay tax and families are highly stressed. When they are trying to think about how they do everything, they have only four days a week free to do any caring duties. I agree that the intergenerational issue is interesting, but there is also the fact that working women have changed the economic dynamics of the family.

Professor Philip Taylor: I was stimulated by what my colleagues have said to make an observation about flexible retirement. There is a lot written about flexible retirement, bridge jobs and so on, often in the form of part-time work. Again, that kind of flexible retirement is often available only to those who can access it. What I mean by that is people such as us, such as me, who have good superannuation funds and can make choices about working part time.

Other people will be working part time not because they want to, but because it is the only kind of work that they can find. They would much rather work full time. I hope we will get on to talking about that later. One of the assumptions around this whole agenda is that older people want to retire flexibly. Yes, they do, if they can, but many have no choice about retiring flexibly. They are forced into it. They need to, but would often prefer to work full time, because of the income it brings.

We are often lectured about the value of flexibility for people of older age. As I said, bridge employment, bridge jobs and that transition to retirement are things that have been thrown around for a long time but, for many older workers, those kinds of bridge jobs just do not exist or they are forced into them with, for instance, part-time work.

Q89 Baroness Wolf of Dulwich: My question is very specific, you will all be glad to know. It is about data. For example, Professor Loretto, you mentioned grandparenting and, Professor Gratton, you mentioned care and people going in and out of the workforce. My question is very simple. Do we have any national longitudinal data that shows us whether people ever come back? What happens if they have stopped, in order to grandparent or to care? Do we know anything about their trajectories after that or do we have only cross-sectional data?

Professor Wendy Loretto: I can come in first on that one. The answer is very short. No, we do not have good longitudinal data. We have some good surveys, such as the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing that you may be familiar with, which captures just England, but is a good snapshot. That does not collect these data. In terms of showing how many people come back into the workforce, particularly if options such as self-employment become more attractive, that would be very useful.

Some of the data we do have on self-employment captures what we call bogus self-employment. People do not want to declare that they are economically inactive, so they declare in these surveys that they are self-employed but, qualitatively, when you pick up with them, they are not actually doing very much work. You are absolutely spot on about the need for better data. We do need that, but, from what we have, the current picture is that, once people leave the labour force, they are very unlikely to come back in. The longer they are out of the labour force, the less likely they are to come back in.

Q90 Lord Blackwell: I just wonder why financial pressures are not more of an issue for those who have some choice in whether they leave work early. We are continually told that people are not saving enough for retirement. The proportion of people with DB pensions has gone down. A lot of people, we know, have very small savings. The vast majority of the population have very small savings.

Clearly, some people may have no choice but, for those who do, for the male population, where you are saying there has not been any increase in people working longer, why are financial pressures not pushing them to that?

Professor Philip Taylor: It is because men have begun to have access to pensions, when they did not in times gone by. Men have access to pensions nowadays in a way that they used not to.

Lord Blackwell: Is that true for people who have been in relatively low-paid jobs all their career?

Professor Philip Taylor: It is absolutely not true for them.

Lord Blackwell: That is most of the population.

Professor Philip Taylor: Instead, they are forced on to different kinds of benefits, such as disability support. There are some men who have access to DB schemes and so on but, yes, the majority do not. It is an issue of being able to find work.

Professor Lynda Gratton: Again, you have heard from the Phoenix Group. I was on the advisory board of the Phoenix Group. This was one of the questions we asked. Phoenix Group is an insurance company, as you know. Andy Briggs is the CEO and he was very interested in this question. What it found in the research that it did was that people were entirely unclear about what their poverty level was going to be.

It was absolutely astonishing, really, how few people understood that there was a possibility that they would be living on the state pension. We decided in the Phoenix Group—I do not know whether you feel any differently about this—that the state pension was simply to stop people starving. That is all it does; it means that you do not starve. It certainly does not give you any sort of a life. People had no idea that this was what was going to happen to them. It is a very important observation.

Lord Blackwell: Once they stop working in their 50s and discover that they are poor, why does that not drive them back to work?

Professor Lynda Gratton: Then we come to the issue that we have all described. The data is quite clear on this. It is extremely difficult to get back into work once you are out.

Professor Wendy Loretto: I completely agree with the points made there. The other aspect I would add is that financial well-being is very subjective and more subjective than we would like it to be. Successive studies I have been involved with since about 2010 have highlighted the subjectivity of financial well-being.

People objectively are not very well off, but they take that in the round with all sorts of other things. Their own health is a primary factor, as we know, as is their partner’s health. In the most recent studies, we have found that the notion of paying off the mortgage is important. For most people, if they have a mortgage, that is the biggest debt that they have and then they subjectively think everything else will be okay.

Aligned with that, there is the well-known phenomenon of health pessimism. Everybody knows somebody who worked a bit longer, retired and then died the next week. Those coming together, as well as the very different life circumstances that people have, means that objective financial well-being is not as big a driver as policy has often assumed.

Q91 Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke: Professor Gratton, I was intrigued by the fact that you had been an adviser in Japan. I have been to Japan only a couple of times, but the structure of its labour force seems much more organised than ours is. Is Japan getting it right with this whole retirement environment it has created?

Professor Lynda Gratton: On the outside, people think that everybody in Japan works in a company such as Fujitsu and goes in every morning. In fact, it has an enormous population of people who do part-time work, people who work for small businesses, people in families.

When you hear about Japanese labour policy, they are really talking about a relatively small group of people. When I speak to people in Japan about what the UK does, they think that the UK is a labour market where everybody gets fired every day and I have to say, “No, no, we actually have a much more stable labour market”. It is a very interesting observation.

People do work longer in Japan and the data shows that. I am not suggesting this is a UK area, but Japan does provide jobs for older people. If you are in Tokyo, you will see that there is going to be some old person helping you across the road or putting shopping into your basket. Those are jobs created specifically for older people.

Q92 Lord Petitgas: Professor Taylor, you mentioned Australia. One of the issues here is the fact that people are either ignorant of the smallness of their pension pot or generally that pensions, apart from DB, are too small, because they have not accrued. What is your experience of superannuation and the Australian system, which we admire from afar, and its impact on behaviour? It does not sound like there is any difference, so I am curious.

Professor Philip Taylor: It has not had a significant impact on people’s behaviour yet, because schemes are still maturing. It is beginning to, but not yet. Successive Australian Governments have endeavoured to push out what they call the age pension in Australia with a huge public backlash. I have been on the radio talking with journalists who are saying, “You’re the professor who wants us to work until we drop”. There is this anxiety about the age pension being 70.

Successive Governments have parked it. They just did not want to go there, because it was toxic electorally. Many Australians still rely on the age pension. Many of us, me included, have access to superannuation, but it is still maturing, so the age pension is still very important for many in Australia, as the state pension is for many in the UK.

Q93 Lord Lamont of Lerwick: My question is in two parts, but I will take it as one question and make things move along. First, what are the main challenges facing the 50-plus age cohort when it comes to employment opportunities? What policies would you put forward to help with that? Secondly, more particularly, how easy is it for the 50-plus age cohort to learn new skills? What are the opportunities and costs associated with focusing policy on this group? Are there any particular policies you would recommend to improve the skills of these workers?

Professor Wendy Loretto: To the first part of your question, you have probably got the idea from our answers so far that keeping people in work is absolutely key. Do not let them fall out of work. There are a host of measures we could take there. We could talk about supporting health needs, but I am not going to focus on that just now. Instead, I am going to talk about support and training for line managers, those who are actually managing the older workforce, some of whom may be older themselves, many of whom will be significantly younger.

A piece of work that the Institute for Employment Studies, along with NICE, did back in around 2019 to provide guidelines on the older workforce said that investing in training was probably the single best thing we could do. We found in our research that very often line managers get the blame. Employees say, “We’re not supported by our line managers”, but line managers do not necessarily know the right thing to do. They are not trained in having sensitive conversations.

Very often, they are afraid that, if they do something to support an older worker, they may be falling foul of the Equality Act by doing something for one age group and not another. Being able to educate them, support them and train line managers to help them support the older workforce is absolutely key.

As part of our recent research project, we partnered with Age Scotland and rolled out line manager training to nearly 1,200 line managers across Scotland, which I believe has now been picked up through the Centre for Ageing Better network and rolled out to England. Again, these things are not quick fixes, but I hope they may start to have benefits when we are changing the culture.

Sorry, I have forgotten the second part of the question. Could you restate that very briefly?

Lord Lamont of Lerwick: It was really about specific skills.

Professor Wendy Loretto: The assumption that you cannot teach an old dog new tricks, that stereotype against older workers, we know from successive work over a long number of years is not true. Actually, the barrier is that older workers are not given the opportunity to learn. Something that came up in your previous evidence session is internalised ageism. An older worker does not necessarily put themselves forward, because they feel, “I’m not worthy of this because I’m older and they won’t want to train me”.

A statistic I often use is to compare the average length of graduate employment with that of somebody, say, over 50. People say, “We won’t train an older worker, because they’re going to leave us. There is no payback”, but the average tenure for a first graduate job is 18 months and yet you would not have an employer saying, “We wouldn’t invest in our graduate workforce”. The barriers are not in the ability to learn or the aptitude to learn, but in the opportunities that are given. To be fair, as I say, some of those barriers are put up by the older workers themselves, because they have lost confidence.

Lord Lamont of Lerwick: What particular skills do you think would be worth concentrating on? The Learning and Work Institute talked about maths, but I would have thought one of the skills older workers might be deficient in is digital skills and technology.

Professor Wendy Loretto: Absolutely, yes. Again as part of my research, we have had cause to investigate the potential uptake of digital apps to help support health at work among the older workforce. The competitor analysis that we are doing worldwide shows that the largest adopters of health apps are the over-50s, I guess because they are interested, but it also shows that digital technology is not a barrier to older people.

There are quite a few lazy assumptions out there and it is probably beholden on us all to keep challenging those. Digital skills are absolutely there. My other colleagues will know this. We all work with MBA students, for example, in our business schools. Surveys of employers say that what is still missing from the people they employ, even with MBAs, and what they are looking for is really good interpersonal skills. They feel they can train up on the digital, but they are really missing good interpersonal skills.

Yes, there are new skills that older workers may need to learn, but we should not throw out what skills they have built up over a lifetime of work, which are still incredibly valuable to the contemporary workforce and workplace.

Professor Lynda Gratton: I would simply agree with everything that Professor Loretto has just said. There is a huge focus in companies right now on skills. Quite a number of large multinationals are putting out a very clear profile. Rather than saying, “This is a job”, they now have skills-based recruitment. This is going to be very helpful, because I absolutely agree that there are things that one does with age that create skills, and yet we do not have a way of describing those. Focusing on skills is very important.

The other point I would make comes out of that data I mentioned earlier, which suggests that, in the UK, people are more likely to leave a job because they do not like the work. That really points to the question of job design. The research on job design for older people is very thin at the moment. If you ask, “What are companies doing to help older workers?” you will almost always get back to BMW and the fact that, in its plants, it is making the carpets thicker and helping people who cannot move so easily be assembly plant workers.

That is really important, but it is about more than that. It is about asking ourselves what people like about work and how we can make that a better experience for them. Part of the reason people leave work is that they do not like the job.

Professor Philip Taylor: I once again agree with a great deal of what my colleagues have just said. From a policy perspective, when we are talking about the 50-plus age cohort, the question I would ask is what people aged 50 and over have in common with other people aged 50 and over. Again, we have a problem here with devising policy for so-called older workers. What do older workers have in common with other older workers? The answer is probably not much.

When we talk about the challenges facing the 50-plus age cohort, there are a lot of assumptions about commonality of problems in that cohort. The problems facing people aged 50 and over are diverse. I often reflect upon the difference between a 45 year-old and a 50 year-old, as opposed to a 50 year-old and a 65 year-old. Surely, people at age 50 have more in common with a 45 year-old than a 65 year-old. When we talk about the needs of the over-50s, they are very diverse. It is very difficult for us to say, “We need to do this or do that, and that will solve the problem”.

As regards your question about learning new skills and so on, the psychological evidence around this is long-standing and quite clear. Wendy has already made this point. You can teach old dogs new tricks. It is just about how you deliver that learning and training. It may be somewhat different for older workers, but there is no doubt—the evidence is quite clear-cut on this—that older workers are just as trainable as anyone else. What is an older worker, however?

The Chair: Are there any countries that offer tax incentives to companies to disproportionately recruit over-55s, or not that you know of?

Professor Philip Taylor: I do not, but countries have tried wage subsidies for companies. The OECD and others have been very critical of wage subsidy schemes, not least because there are probably significant deadweight effects. A very powerful argument against them is that they stigmatise.

Lord Burns: You do not pay national insurance contributions over retirement age. That is quite a big difference.

Chair: There is an implicit subsidy there.

Q94 Lord Verjee: I also have two questions, but I will roll them into one. What is your response to fears over the automation of many jobs and the challenges posed by digital know-how? How do we deal with the digitally left behind? How well placed is each generation ahead of the possible AI revolution? How will older generations cope? Is there a risk that AI jobs will be those that are more difficult for older workers, such as manual labour or in-person service economy positions? What is the role of AI and any other digital revolution that might take place that we do not know of yet?

Professor Wendy Loretto: That is quite a difficult one to answer. What is going to take place that we do not know about? I would revert to my previous answer and say that the skills that many people—not everybody—build up over their life course, which includes working, are the ones that will survive automation. There are the interpersonal skills that I talked about, but also the ability to critically appraise a situation, a problem or whatever, knowing what experience and knowledge to bring in and how. Not just for those of us of a certain age, but for all of us, those are going to be the key skills that get through automation and particularly AI’s role in automation.

Also, this is only emerging evidence at the moment, so I do not want to say how widespread it is, but qualitative research suggests that people over 50 are very interested in AI technology as part of their life. That includes their working life. I do not want to overstate that at the moment, because there has not been detailed research done in the workplace.

There are opportunities to do a lot more. I talked about intergenerational aspects of living, but there is a lot of opportunity for intergenerational mentoring in the workplace. Where that has taken place, in a fairly limited number of cases, it has been very positive for workplace culture more generally. One thing we have not talked about in the course of this session is the move to hybrid working, which has persisted after Covid and is still quite contentious.

Technology can be used to help people bond more when they are working remotely, but in particular we need to share learning about how we can harness AI technology in bringing people back to the workplace. That gives us opportunities for intergenerational collaboration. It is not just about training people because of their age. It is a collaborative and shared approach to learning about something that is really quite new and different for everybody.

Professor Lynda Gratton: My fears of automation and digital and generative AI are much more about young people than old people. I am extremely concerned about the impact of generative AI in particular on the learning and the practice of young people. If you look at how people learn through their life, they learn through observation and practice. What is happening to young people right now is that they are not observing, because they are hybrid—they are working from home—and they are not practising, because of generative AI. An older worker can now use generative AI and never have to talk to or ask a younger person to do anything, because it is doing it for them.

I am extremely concerned about the impact of generative AI in particular on knowledge work, which is a huge part of the UK economy, but my concerns are more about young people than older. As Professor Loretto has shown, there is some evidence—the New York Times covered it extensively last week, because it loves all this stuff—that older people are really getting engaged with digital. There just does not seem to be evidence of the idea that, because you are old, you do not use generative AI.

Those are my fears. They are for young people, not older people. Intergenerational mentoring has been shown to be very helpful. What an older person brings, which generative AI does not, is experience. For example, a younger person has not necessarily lived through a recession, so they do not know how to deal with that. Older people bring memories, which generative AI does not have, although it might pretend to, and they bring empathy and understanding. As I say, I am not really worried about older people. It is the young people I am really concerned about.

Professor Philip Taylor: I did a piece of research a few years ago looking at robotics and digital technologies, and their impact on older workers. We looked at people aged 35 to 50 and we observed that around half of them, around 49%, were in jobs that were likely to be automated. This was in Australia, I should say. We concluded that, by 2031, that would mean that 2.5 million people would have potentially been made redundant due to automation.

Although certain groups, such as those in manual occupations, were disproportionately affected, it affected all occupational groups, our research found. No one was immune to the effects of this. Of course, everyone will also say that all of this is likely to be a job creator too, but we do not know. The jury is still out.

Lord Verjee: I find your angle, Professor Gratton, interesting. We could turn this on its head here. It is the first positive news we have heard, where there could be a huge competitive advantage for the over-50s, the over-60s, the ageing society. That is what I am hearing from you.

Professor Lynda Gratton: Yes. They just have to carry on working.

Professor Philip Taylor: It is an interesting conversation. We often talk about older workers being the holders of corporate memory. The question I would ask is whether industry values corporate memory. There is good research that indicates the answer is no. Older workers are viewed as an impediment to the future.

One of the arguments for employing older workers—and I have heard this over my entire working life—is that they have experience and they bring memory. “That is a good thing, isn’t it?” No, not necessarily, when you speak to employers: “Experience of what? Experience of the past. We don’t want the past. We want to move into robotics and digital technologies”. The business case for employing older workers—and I should know, because I wrote one once—was about older workers’ experience and things such as memory. The evidence is that it is not necessarily valued. Maybe we will come back to this point later, Chair.

Q95 Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke: Oddly enough, this fits in very well with what you have been talking about. Can you tell us something about how age interacts with other characteristics, such as gender, education or location? How is this relevant for policy? It seems that those three can come together in very different ways. How do you get a uniform policy across the board?

Professor Philip Taylor: To be slightly controversial, there is a lot written, for instance, about gendered ageism. Again, forgive me for referring back to research that I have done in Australia, but we looked at gendered ageism. We observed that it was more likely to be a phenomenon of young men than older women. When we talk about gendered ageism, we often talk about it in terms of the double jeopardy of being an older woman. We found that it was more likely to be a problem for younger men.

Women’s experience of discrimination did not change. They were discriminated against when they were younger and they were discriminated against when they were older too. We did not observe that double jeopardy. It was a problem facing young men.

This issue of these various factors interacting is really critical here, because it goes back to my earlier point about what an older worker is. How can we devise policy for such a diverse cohort as the over-50s?

Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke: That is the core of it. That is the most difficult part of it.

Professor Philip Taylor: That is fundamentally the problem with policy-making for the 50-plus or even the 60-plus. Age interacts in very complex ways with a range of factors. How is it possible to devise policy that way? That is a very tricky endeavour, so it is a really important question. Colleagues will come in on this, but I have not seen good, thoughtful policy around this issue anywhere. We will default to policy for the over-50s.

Professor Lynda Gratton: I would agree. On the face of it, the most important interaction is health. As we age, the variance within an age cohort increases. The variance between 70 year-olds is greater than it would be between 40 year-olds or 30 year-olds. The age variance makes it extremely difficult to make policy.

The second thing I want to briefly mention about age interactions is social interaction, particularly in terms of size of family and numbers of children born. In Japan, it has left a group of young people, all of whom are looking after their parents. When I have been in Japan and have wondered why there is not more entrepreneurial vigour, why they are not taking more risks, the reason is that they are all looking after a parent or a grandparent in some form or another.

That is also because of the Japanese family structure, but it does mean that the dependency rates are such that to be a young person now in Japan is to feel that you have to look after a whole bunch of older people. As you know, in Japan, older people are seen as being wise. There is some good reason to be older, but the dependency rate is another element that interacts with age.

Professor Wendy Loretto: I would completely agree that the sheer variation and complexity of the interweaving factors make it difficult, but we are starting to get understanding of some areas that were less understood or more hidden. There are opportunities there. I do not often disagree with Phil, but I might disagree in terms of the gendered ageism. There is emerging evidence that women have left the workforce because of a lack of support when they were going through menopause; that is perimenopause, menopause itself and post-menopause. The lack of understanding and support has meant that women have left the workforce entirely or has been a driver for women to go into self-employment.

There are some areas where we are understanding those intersections a bit more. Another one is perhaps ethnicity and economic inactivity among older workers. For example, the Greater Manchester Combined Authority has done some excellent work in trying to understand that balance between paid and unpaid work. Again, there is a very low employment rate of women of all ages, but virtually nothing at older ages. It is looking at the role that these women play within the community to support others to work.

It is incredibly complex and there is no simple answer. We know that. You would not be here if there was, but we are gaining knowledge in particular areas. It is beholden on us to use that knowledge in particular areas to see where we can make interventions.

If I could go back to a comment Professor Gratton made some time ago about how this is a lifetime process, I agree completely. That is another policy opportunity, intervening at earlier points in the life course to help people think through what their life is going to be, including their working life. It could pay great benefits for improving the employment opportunities of the over-50s.

Baroness Liddell of Coatdyke: The very fact that you are talking about the over-50s and Professor Taylor has been talking about Australia is quite interesting. I lived in Australia for five years and I had two members of staff who were in their mid to late 70s. They were very effective members of staff. I had completely forgotten about them.

Q96 Lord Turnbull: The question on the paper here is: how prevalent is ageism? I do not think it is a measurable concept. Here is a different way of putting it: do you think there is a trend that ageism is becoming less acute? If so, how would you document that? What evidence would you use?

Does it come about from what Professor Loretto called “lazy assumptions” by employers, by people themselves? How far are there statutory or regulatory incentives built in that were created in some earlier era where people thought that getting rid of older people was a good thing, but that are still with us? We have not cleared out these old assumptions about retirement ages, pension accruals, term limits on employment and so on. Are there things you can see in the legislative and semi-legislative structure that still need to be cleared out?

Professor Wendy Loretto: Ageism is different. It is qualitatively different from the other “isms” that are included in the Equality Act. It is sometimes said it is the only form of discrimination we practise against ourselves, very often caused by a fear of morbidity and mortality. It is qualitatively different. It is certainly qualitatively different in society.

You may well have heard the birthday card example. You can go into a supermarket or card shop, where they still exist, whether online or in person, and look at any number of cards that are quite rude about age and take the concept of humour rather too far, but you would never see a similar card on the subject of gender, sexuality or ethnicity. Ageism is acceptable in society in a way that the others are not. That undoubtedly colours the workplace.

You asked about lazy assumptions. I would question the term “lazy”. Assumptions are still made by employers that may have limited evidence. “I had an older worker once and they were great”. For example, the colleague in the panel who mentioned the two workers in their 70s in Australia probably has a very good perception of people in their 70s because of that, but what we hear more often is, “We kept somebody on when really they should have been retired. It didn’t work out and therefore we wouldn’t want to do it again”. It is that negative effect.

The internalised ageism where people are discriminating against themselves is not lazy, I would say, but is more because of that lack of confidence. Quite often when you talk to people nowadays, because of the law, they are not worried about losing their current job because of age, but they are very reluctant to look for other jobs because they think, “Nobody would want me”.

We do have very good evidence. Study after study shows that, unfortunately, employers are reluctant to take people on. In a study that came out last autumn, 57 seemed to be the age when employers do not want to take people on. They perceive them as being too old. Unfortunately, that is gendered, in that women are seen to get older earlier than men are.

The law has been incredibly helpful for raising the profile of ageism. We know that cases to do with age have a less chance of succeeding at an employment tribunal. Age is very much the poor relation of the “isms” at the moment.

Lord Turnbull: In the House, there is an employment Bill. Are there things that we should be putting in it? Are we missing a chance? Can you think of specific changes that would make this position of older people better that we are missing?

Professor Wendy Loretto: Do you want me to answer that very quickly? It is a very indirect answer to it, but please bear with me. Health will be a key focus. As you know, one of the main provisions is that people will be entitled to sick pay. From day one, they will not have qualifying leave. There is a real concern, from many employers I have spoken to over recent months, that that will affect their older workforce and, therefore, you could argue that means that is another pressure against employing older people. Actually, it is an opportunity for employers to really start saying, “We need to invest in the health of our entire workforce and make sure that we are not running the risk of raising our sickness absence bills”.

We know that sickness absence is highest for over-50s, whether you look at it in gross terms or the number of days’ absence. Ironically, something that is coming in not to do with age, but to do with health, may prompt employers into taking more action over something that could help support older people to work for longer. Sorry, that was a bit of an indirect answer, but I hope that made some sense.

Professor Philip Taylor: I will just come back to something Wendy just said about internalised ageism. It is a really important point. Again, forgive me for referring to research I did in Australia. We looked at the incidence of reported experiences of discrimination at different ages, and we found that older workers’ reported experiences of discrimination were relatively low and relatively modest.

We have looked at other studies in Australia with relatively low reports of perceived ageism, which we find really very interesting, because old people will often report that age discrimination is endemic. Why is that? It is because advocacy organisations tell them it is. Older people are often told that the barrier to them finding a job is ageism. They internalise that, as we know from research, and that leads them to withdraw from the labour market because they are told there is no point in looking for a job any more. “I’m too old”.

We need to be very careful about describing ageism as being endemic in our society, and I am not convinced the evidence for that assertion is very strong anyway, but it can be hugely damaging for people’s sense of self‑worth if they are basically being written off.

Professor Lynda Gratton: As you have heard from my colleagues, there is real data on ageism. The study that I find quite interesting is one where the researchers sent a CV to a series of employers and then changed the age. When the age was higher than a certain number—I do not remember what it was—not a single employer came back to want to interview. Even getting past the interview stage is extremely difficult when people are over the age of, I guess, 50.

I would make two general points about the prevalence of ageism. First, it is really important, in terms of how we describe things, that we focus on good practice. There are good practices in some organisations. The retail sector in particular thinks a lot more about how it might use older workers. You will know this from the B&Q case. B&Q realised that the people who came into B&Q were themselves older people, and what they really wanted was an older person to help them understand what products they should be buying. This focus on “what good practice is” is very important.

I have been disappointed about ageism for some time. The reason is that I run a research consortium of companies, which has been going on for 15 years now, and every year we choose a topic. Because I have written extensively about older workers, every year I say, “Is this the year that we choose this as a research topic? We all get together as a bunch of multinationals from all over the world and talk about older workers”. Every single year they say no. There is just no appetite to talk about it.

Yet at the same time people say 60 is the new 40 and 70 is the new 50. As individuals, we feel we are ageing differently, and people are—each generation is ageing differently—but corporations are still holding on to some pretty old‑fashioned views about what it is to be over 50. When you say, “Why don’t you employ them?”, they say, “They are too expensive and that is an issue”. Singapore, for example, is quite clever about that. The Singaporean Civil Service says, “You need to retire at 64. We will then employ you again, but not in the same job”.

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich: Can I come back on that, because I know there are areas where this is genuinely the case? I am not sure that counts as ageism, to be honest. How widespread is that, do you think?

Professor Lynda Gratton: How widespread is what?

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich: How widespread is the fact that you do not take on an older worker because you see them as too expensive? Is that likely to be only in organised professions? Is it really a widespread concern?

Professor Lynda Gratton: People get more expensive as they go through their career, because every year they get some sort of an increase in their salary.

Baroness Wolf of Dulwich: That is only if they remain in the same occupation.

Professor Lynda Gratton: If you think about an hourly wage, I guess the argument you are making is that it will be the same for whoever does that job. You can see that with Uber drivers, for example. Uber drivers do not get paid more because they are older. I take that point, yes.

Professor Philip Taylor: Could I make a quick comment? I recall very good-quality evidence from the Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia Survey, which is the sister of ELSA in Australia, and other surveys that demonstrates over time declining reports of age discrimination in the labour market from workers. There are quite significant declines. That is very powerful evidence.

Professor Lynda Gratton: Once they get into work, they are not discriminated against. It is just hard for them to get the job.

Professor Philip Taylor: This is a national survey of all people, not just those in work. It suggests to me that we could do something about ageism and that it is not something that we cannot fix as a problem. Over time, the reported incidence among workers is going down, which I think is very exciting evidence.

Q97 Lord Razzall: One of the problems we have on this committee is that we are going to have to come up with a report that has recommendations as to what we should do. We have had a lot of interesting conversations with a lot of witnesses, including the three of you, which have been absolutely fascinating, but I would like to try to pin the three of you down to what you think has worked in terms of programme or policy, in the UK or abroad, and what we could advocate. Now, bearing in mind some of the work you have done, Professor Loretto, perhaps I should start with you.

Professor Wendy Loretto: I would come to training, definitely. I revert to my previous answer about training line managers. That is showing results within individual organisations. In terms of scaling that up to the economy, I do not think we have the evidence yet, but you can see it within certain sectors. Professor Gratton mentioned retail, which has a very proactive approach. That is very promising.

To go back to the last question, Professor Gratton mentioned the B&Q example, which is quite a famous one. B&Q actually stopped its focus on older workers. Why did it do that? It did that because it was afraid of falling foul of the equalities legislation, which protects against any discrimination on the grounds of age. The last question asked about changing laws. I am not saying I advocate this, but it is a question: should we be protecting certain age groups from age discrimination or focusing our efforts on age groups? We know that it is the two ends of the labour market, the youngest and the oldest, who probably do suffer most from what we call age discrimination.

Are there opportunities to change the law? For example, if there is no comparison group, a successful age case cannot be brought. If you happen to be in an organisation that is relatively homogenous in age, you can still experience discrimination on the grounds of your age, but you do not have a natural comparator. That comes back to something we have talked about across this: that there is such a huge difference between people at 50 and people in their late 70s, and even beyond, who may still be in the workforce. That is a very big challenge when we are looking at the equalities legislation, but perhaps it is time we had a look at the equalities legislation in that respect.

Lord Razzall: You said your first answer was to concentrate on training, but, if you were us, what would you recommend? Do we recommend some form of legislation? Do we recommend encouragement to employers? What should we say?

Professor Wendy Loretto: When Andy Briggs was the government tsar for older workers—that may not be quite the correct title; I can find out—there was a charge on employers to raise the number of older workers they employed and to invest a particular amount in the budget. With various things, not limited to but including Covid, that fell off everybody’s radar. Bringing something like that back may not be a bad thing to look at.

Professor Lynda Gratton: I would create a policy around lifelong learning. To get a sense of that, I would look to the Singapore Government, who make an amount of money available to people of all ages to learn something every year.

I remember being in Singapore and asking people from the department of learning, which is the group that does that, “What is it that people are learning?” They said the number one thing that people are learning is the Korean language. I asked, “Why is that?” They said, “Well, because they want to watch Korean television series”. I asked, “How do you feel about that? How do you feel about subsidising a whole bunch of people to learn Korean?”, to which they said, “Learning is a habit”.

It really does not matter what people learn. They just need to learn. Over their whole life, they need to learn something new. I come back to the point that we made at the very beginning, which is that it is too late at 60 or 50 to tell somebody to work for another two years. As a Government, you have to start much earlier to encourage lifelong learning, and that would be my way of doing that.

The second area I would focus on is flexible work. I mentioned earlier that, if you are going to work into your 70s, you cannot have a three‑stage life of full‑time education, full‑time work and full‑time retirement. You have to have a working life that helps you take time out, to learn, to travel, to become healthy again. That requires flexible working. Those would be my two policies.

Lord Razzall: Professor Taylor, you said earlier that, when we ask these questions, people always default to looking at the post-50s. Can we ask you to default to the post‑50s and ask you what you would do?

Professor Philip Taylor: I will try my best. A lot of public policy internationally has defaulted to that, and there are a range of special schemes focused on the over‑50s. Going back to the future a little bit, revisiting the New Deal 50 Plus scheme from the early 2000s would be a good place to start. That was a well‑evaluated public employment programme, which was quite highly regarded, I recall, at the time.

Lord Razzall: When was that introduced?

Professor Philip Taylor: Wendy, who has gone, could probably correct me, but the early 2000s. New Deal 50 Plus was a well‑evaluated public employment programme in the UK and was regarded generally as being quite successful.

I was reflecting on this question earlier. In the US, there is a long‑standing public employment programme called SCSEP, particularly focusing on socially disadvantaged older workers, providing them with supported employment. It has been around a long time in the US. It is under threat; it has been under threat quite a lot. It is under threat at the moment for reasons that you can probably imagine. The interesting thing about SCSEP, however, is that it is more effective for some workers than others. Older-older workers are less successful through SCSEP. Workers with disabilities are less successful through SCSEP.

There is, again, an Australian example of a public employment programme focusing on the over‑50s and it specifically targeted socially disadvantaged older workers. What did the evaluation find? It found that it did not help them and that the problem was creaming effects. The better employment prospects were the ones who got the most attention and did well.

There is a lack of rigorous evaluations of these employment programmes. We were very blessed with New Deal 50 Plus in the UK. My colleagues at IES in Sussex evaluated that programme and did a fabulous job. If I may come back to the problem, and this point has already been made, how do you devise public employment programmes for such a diverse group? Sorry for sounding like I am repeating myself, but that is surely fundamentally the problem here.

Lord Razzall: Are there any examples from Australia you would recommend?

Professor Philip Taylor: I gave you an example, but they are limited. A programme was tried, but buried deep in the evaluation report was the fact that it did not work. It got lots of people into jobs, but those older workers would have got jobs anyway, and that is fundamentally the problem, it seems to me. SCSEP in the US is often put up as a model of good practice, and it is an interesting public programme of long standing, but does it work for the people who need it most? That is open to a lot of doubt.

I would come back to that fundamental problem of devising employment programmes for people aged over 50. Maybe the answer is to focus on particular occupational groups, going in and doing granular public policy. Blanket schemes for the over‑50s do not seem to me intellectually to make a lot of sense.

The Chair: We have a few follow-up questions based on what you have just said.

Q98 Lord Burns: We talked earlier about people who retire but have scarcely enough to live on and some of the difficult choices they have. If we take the subset of people who do have pensions and can probably retire on just about enough to get by, such as teachers, local authority workers or white‑collar people, what choices are they making about their post‑retirement life? What choices should they be making and what can be done to encourage them, if anything?

Professor Lynda Gratton: Do you mean the choices they are making about work?

Lord Burns: I mean choices about whether to work and what to do with their life. People with pensions have to decide what they are going to do with their life at the point at which they retire. Are they genuinely retiring?

Professor Lynda Gratton: This notion of a long retirement after you finish work is only just beginning to emerge. When each one of us thinks about our future life, we look to role models; we look to ways of describing it. I feel that we are only just beginning to understand that. If I look at my colleagues who are writing books at the moment, there is a whole bunch of books that will come out in the next year about how to manage your life after the age of 50, and those books were really not around very much. It is a very important question, and we are only just beginning to understand it.

I am a writer of books. When I teach and when I write books, I encourage people to work into their 70s. That is what I am currently saying in the books that I am writing, because we know it is extremely difficult to save enough money to live well, and you would be better placed to try to build the human capital that allows you to work longer than try to work very hard to save.

There is a big debate in Japan about this. I do not know whether you have seen this. There is a whole philosophical view that what you need to do is to work very, very hard, earn money and then stop working. The book I am finishing at the moment takes the perspective that you would be much wiser to try to work as long as you can. That means you have to focus on your health, your friendships, your skills, all of that, and you have to do that right through your life.

Professor Philip Taylor: I completely agree. When people ask my advice, I say, “Work for as long as you can”.

Lord Razzall: This committee has taken your advice.

Professor Philip Taylor: It is a really interesting point. One thing I jotted down earlier was the notion of the retirement career, and people not knowing what to do in retirement, not planning for their retirement, and having a great deal of uncertainty about what they are going to do. You might have choices about blending work and doing something else, such as caring or leisure.

This idea of the retirement career is worth looking into, but again, for the reasons you have just outlined, it is a very nascent area. There are expectations about what one does when one is older. One retires and goes off on cruises and so on, and there is a whole industry devoted to this. People do not have expectations that work might be a good thing.

Professor Lynda Gratton: This question of portfolio is really important. We have not mentioned it in this meeting, but the word that describes that currently, and you might remember it from Charles Handy, is “portfolio”. That captures the idea that you would do many things, some of which, but not all, would involve you paying tax. Helping the population of the UK imagine a future where they would have a portfolio life is my role, anyway, and your role is to make sure the Government are able to support that.

Q99 Baroness Wolf of Dulwich: We have talked a lot about getting people back to work because it is economically helpful, with declining and worsening dependency ratios, but we know that unemployment for younger people is actually bad for them. It is bad for their health; it is bad for their mental health; it is bad for everything about them. Is there any reason to suppose that that is any less true for people in their 60s or 70s? I cannot see why it would be.

Professor Lynda Gratton: We have data on that. These are only very particular small studies, but what we know, for example, of accountants in the big accounting firms is that, if they retire early, they die earlier. That is one of the reasons why the accountancy firms are now doing these programmes to help you think about retirement and how you retire. We think the reason is partly to do with adrenaline, which is to say that these are jobs with high amounts of adrenaline and you are suddenly cut off from them. That really affects your health. The second thing is that they just do not know what to do with themselves.

For me, the idea of working longer in a job that you like, in a portfolio life, just helps you to manage the fact that you could live until you are 90 years old.

The Chair: We have a lot of follow‑up questions and a very small amount of time. It is fascinating. If we can encourage you to be really brief in the answers to these follow‑ups, that would be really helpful.

Q100 Lord Verjee: This might seem like a very left‑field field of inquiry, but it just occurs to me that transport infrastructure is a really important factor in an ageing society. Do we have figures on how much time people take to commute to work? It seems to me an older person would find it more difficult and would not want to commute so often to work, so should we be looking at our transport infrastructure? If we had better transport infrastructure, would that encourage more people to go to work? It seems to me an ageing society does not want to spend two hours going to and from work. Have there been any studies on this? Is this an area we should look at?

Professor Philip Taylor: I am familiar with research from many years ago, from the 1990s, around what older people value about going to work, and then the finding was that it was human contact; it was interacting with people. Given recent events with Covid and so on, it would be very interesting to revisit that kind of research and look at the impact of that kind of working on older workers, but the evidence from the 1990s was that older people value travelling to work because of that human contact. It is a really interesting question.

Professor Lynda Gratton: This is a fascinating question. One thing I study these days is hybrid working: why people work from home rather than coming into the office. We know the number one reason why people do not want to work in an office is travel time. The average travel time in London is one and a half hours each way. It is exhausting. I absolutely agree with you. This is a really important question.

The second point around that is that there is some research to show that older people do better in cities than they do in rural villages, which is odd. It is partly because they have better access to health facilities, and partly because they just have better access to social events.

I wanted to very briefly mention Fujitsu, a Japanese multinational, which has been thinking a lot about this. It has built hubs so that people do not have to commute. It takes the work to people. Some people work from home, but some people work in hubs, which are closer to home. I agree that the long commute is terrible for everyone, but particularly for older people.

Professor Philip Taylor: Very quickly in response to Baroness Wolf’s interesting question, I can provide you with a paper, Baroness, on age, mental health and unemployment. The evidence is very poor, we concluded, but we concluded that older workers were indeed impacted by joblessness.

One of the historical arguments for getting rid of older workers was that they are nearly retired, so it is going to be fine, and we need to look after the middle‑aged and younger, but there is contrary evidence to that. I would be very happy to provide the committee with that paper.

Q101 Lord Londesborough: I wanted to follow up on Lord Verjee’s question. All three of you, in your opening comments, in a positive light, suggested there was a growing trend in terms of part‑time work for the over‑50s, self‑employment, the gig economy. I certainly do not have any data on this, but one of the challenges, coming back to your example on accountants, is that there is a cliff‑edge aspect for the majority in their 60s, going from full-time work to no work.

I would have thought that technology, with the ability to work from home and remote technology, should be opening up opportunities for the over‑50s, certainly over‑60s and, indeed, over‑70s, because I think a lot of them would choose to work part time and cannot work full time. If it is a binary choice, they retire and stop working altogether.

I do not know whether there are any studies on this. In terms of programmes, it sounds a bit strange, but I have also heard an idea of encouraging the over-60s to become entrepreneurs, which is generally thought of as a young person’s aim.

You all mentioned this in your opening comments as a positive trend in terms of employment among over-50s. I am interested as to whether there is any evidence of that. I would have thought there would be, given what is happening with working practices.

Professor Philip Taylor: I have a paper about that. Every academic says the same thing, I am sure, but I can provide you with a paper that we just had published last year specifically on senior entrepreneurship and Covid, the lead-up to Covid and after Covid. This idea of senior entrepreneurship is a popular one, and it is much pushed, but we need to be cautious about presenting this as being an opportunity for everybody, particularly given people are not necessarily able to make up any lost income if they go bankrupt or if their company fails, as they so often do. I am very happy to provide a paper on that.

Professor Lynda Gratton: We are seeing significant growth in freelance work. It is important to differentiate between gig work, where it is unskilled and precarious, and skilled freelancers. We would want people in the UK to be encouraged to become skilled. To do that, they need to have a skill that others want to buy, so they need to be encouraged to train. That is my main point.

Q102 Lord Agnew of Oulton: Professor Gratton, you mentioned a moment ago that it is so difficult to save for old age and, therefore, you just keep working grimly. I just did a few calculations on the back of an envelope. If you started saving £500 a year, you did that for 35 years, you increased it by 2.5% a year, and you assumed an average return of 6%, that is 80,000 quid at the end of it. You have inflation, but I then looked up the stock market returns for the last 35 years. They were 8.6%. It is a fairly conservative figure. Is this not just a cultural problem?

I have kids in their 20s. They waste money on Deliveroo and ultra‑processed food every week. It is 12 quid a week, 50 quid a month and 500 quid a year. Surely that is where we should be. You mentioned Japanese comics and stuff there. Should we not be working much harder with young people from probably A‑levels through university to educate them of the power of compounding?

Professor Lynda Gratton: Yes, I entirely agree. Andrew Scott, who is an economist, and I wrote a book called The 100‑Year Life, and one of the illustrations shows your savings rate, when you start saving, how much you save, and therefore at what age you would be able to retire. People like to retire at half their final salary. Saving is very, very important. I absolutely agree with you, and it is really important that we train young people to save and to not have Deliveroo or the coffee. I entirely agree on that.

We also have to help people understand that work is good, purposeful work will help them live longer and the social connections they make will be important to them. They need to learn to build a portfolio life towards the end of their life.

Professor Philip Taylor: In 20 words or less, we should be concerned about the downstream effects of social disadvantage at earlier ages.

Q103 Lord Lamont of Lerwick: I wanted to ask Professor Gratton a question. It is a macro question, rather than the sort of micro questions we have been involved in, but it is specifically about Japan. I read a report recently that officials in the Japanese Government thought that the worst of the ageing crisis had now passed, and that they had turned a corner in Japan. I am not sure what is meant by “turned a corner” or “got past the worst”; maybe they were thinking in terms of labour shortages or financial implications, but of course they have entered into a new phase with an absolute decline in the size of the population.

Do you have a comment on that? Do you think it is right that they have turned a corner in some sense?

Professor Lynda Gratton: I do not know the data on that, but certainly what I see when I speak to people in Japan is the realisation that Japan was the first of the developed countries through that period where people lived longer and had fewer children, and so the dependency rates began to change. What they will all say to you now in Japan is that the next one through is China, and that will impact China a great deal. The dependency rates in China are accelerating much more quickly than they ever did in Japan.

I am not sure exactly what is happening in Japan now. I could imagine it has stabilised, but the country that is going to be most affected in terms of its labour force is China.

Professor Philip Taylor: I worked with Ernst & Young on a project a little while ago and, again, I can provide you with the paper that came out of that, but going forward we saw a remarkable gap in terms of labour demand and labour supply, not just in Japan but in South Korea and China. I am really interested by what you just said because our evidence was that things were only going to get worse in Japan. I am intrigued.

The Chair: Lord Petitgas had a follow‑up, but he also has the last scheduled question. Maybe you could do an omnibus version of your question.

Lord Petitgas: I was reflecting on what you were saying. You struck me with your point about the future self. We are coming to the point here about the future of work and what it actually means to be working, and this idea that when you are 60 or 57 you cannot get a real full‑time job, and you do not want that job, but those in their 30s do not want that job either. Everybody is trying to wrestle with the same thing.

That is not a question, that is an observation, but it comes into the last question, which is this. Having covered a lot of ground here, we are looking for recommendations, but beyond the recommendations to the Government we also need to think about what kind of public advocacy we need to think about.

We have covered a lot of the ground on ageism. Is it misrepresented? Is it represented properly? What are the things that we could think about to bend the light and to change the perception? Is it in the sense of lifelong learning? Is it the idea that one could think about the future self? Is it the issues of work? There is a whole mixed bag here, but think about advocacy in the public sphere.

Professor Lynda Gratton: I have just been really knocked out by Japan. The book that Andrew and I wrote, The 100‑Year Life, sold a million copies. It was the most read business book in Japan, which tells you a lot about the people there, that that is what they are interested in. It was changed into three manga versions, for 50 year‑olds, 40 year‑olds and 30 year‑olds. It has now been rolled out into Japanese schools to help young people think about the future of work.

People need a new image in their mind, and role models are going to be important. I work at the level of corporations, not of Governments, but what I know from corporations is that, when people have a persona, they imagine what they or others could be. They have something to walk towards. When we change as individuals, we change not because we are running away from something we are frightened of, but because we walk towards something that we like. We have to give people a sense of what that is. That is why I told you I was 70, and that is why I do it in all my speeches. It is really important that people realise you can be amazing at any age.

Professor Philip Taylor: I would say something slightly different. Advocacy has a problem with ageism and there are innumerable examples in the literature of age advocacy being ageist. For instance, we are told that older people are more reliable and committed than younger ones. This draws directly from age stereotypes. We see this in business arguments for employing older workers. “You should employ older workers because they’re more reliable than younger ones”.

It sends very confusing messages to employers when you are deploying ageism to challenge ageism. I find it very puzzling in the discourse around ageing and work that we do not seem to have grasped this. That is a common phenomenon I have seen across age advocacy all over the world.

There are very highly regarded reports, for instance from the Stanford Center on Longevity, that talk about the benefits of the vitality of youth and the wisdom of older people. I find this sort of language very dispiriting. I thought the whole point was challenging ageism, not just buying into and amplifying it.

Lord Petitgas: I remember in one of your papers you said that “older is better” is obviously just as bad as “younger is better”. The line was, “Age does not matter”.

Professor Philip Taylor: Why should age matter? The evidence is that it does not matter for most jobs. There are some jobs it does matter for, such as fighter pilots, but most of us do not do jobs where age matters much. When the business case is made that older is better than younger, or vice versa, it is important that we take those arguments on. Otherwise I am afraid that we are not going to move things forward.

The Chair: Ending on the theme that you can be wonderful at any age has found a receptive audience with this committee. Thank you very much, Professor Gratton, Professor Taylor, and Professor Loretto, who had to leave us a few minutes early. We are really, really grateful. As I said earlier, we will be giving you a transcript for you to look at. With that, I declare the meeting over. Thank you.