“Will you still need me, will you still feed me, when I’m sixty-four?”
The Beatles, from Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band
The Beatles could have been forgiven for including this song 55 years ago in their landmark album ‘Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band’. Sir Paul McCartney is now 80 and still going strong, and we have a new monarch who's just given his maiden Christmas broadcast at the age of 74.
Our response to the Truss-Kwarteng ‘mini budget’ was the 26th September commentary ‘Workforce Capacity is the Missing Link’. Recognising the constraints on growth as a result of such a full level of employment, we called for action then to mobilise both young and old.
The BBC invariably gets there in the end and, sure enough (even though their timing left much to be desired), on Christmas Eve they reported that the Government is ‘considering plans to coax retired middle-aged workers back into jobs to boost the economy’. It is indeed time to look at this more closely.
We are particularly grateful to Simon Lambert and Georgie Frost for picking up this theme in their year-end This is Money programme. The mystery of over half a million people not returning to work after the pandemic does indeed merit some closer analysis.
I suspect it's not because huge numbers of people are sitting passively in front of their television screens drinking cups of tea: it's more likely that most of them have discovered new ways of working from home, and are enjoying the liberation of not clocking into work each day. The tech revolution has presented huge opportunities for those with a spark of ingenuity, and it's not just the young who can take advantage of it.
What is undoubtedly true is that ‘if you don't use it, you'll lose it’ — and that reality becomes more significant with every year that passes from middle-age onwards.
A great example of senior citizens’ entrepreneurial activity is to be found in The Oldie magazine, which is full of humour, information and intrigue. The last few pages are packed full of people parading their wares, from travel and holiday offers to music composition, from publicising and editing services to video production, and from collecting memorabilia to researching family trees.
These are indeed active oldies: and, while the Office for National Statistics and the Bank of England may puzzle over why they're not available for working in the health service or on the transport system, many will have set up limited companies and be earning their fair share from home: maybe that's why such a large proportion of those half a million ‘early retirees’ are not claiming benefits.
The fact is, as our late Queen said when she declined the ‘Oldie of the Year’ award in October 2021, ‘you're as old as you feel’; and if you don't want to feel old, get out there and do something — if not with your body, then definitely with your mind. As we said in our commentary ‘Health and the Economy’ on 17th October, a programme of training for old age could be a valuable contribution to reducing the huge burden of caring for older folk in the health service.
Perhaps that's another idea for an enterprising oldie to take up — there might be lots of demand for it, possibly even from the Government once the penny has dropped!
Happy New Year for this Sunday
Gavin Oldham OBE
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