Employment experts have hit back at the chancellor’s suggestion that over-50s should get off the golf course and return to work to help tackle the UK’s labour shortages.
MPs on the business, energy and industrial strategy committee were told that while millions of older people want to work, they often have long-term health conditions, care responsibilities, or are struggling to find a flexible job.
The developments followed comments made by Jeremy Hunt last month that over-50s could make an “enormous contribution” to the UK.
“You can have an enormously rich life by continuing to make a contribution to the economy. It doesn’t just have to be about going to the golf course,” he told the Times.
Lucy Standing, a co-founder of Brave Starts, which supports mid- and late-career professionals, told MPs: “Do I feel [older people] are busy on a golf course out of choice? I would say absolutely not. I would say to Jeremy Hunt, if you want people to get off the golf course, or out of the yoga room, or drinking coffee, or whatever it is he thinks we’re doing, I would suggest why doesn’t he start leading the way.
“There are a number of barriers – lack of flexible jobs, outdated recruitment practices … there are no programmes for career changes or people wanting to re-enter the workplace, or very few of them. There is no career guidance or support for people who have no idea what they want to do next, but they do want to work, and there’s no role models or blueprints for how to do it.”
Also addressing the committee, Tony Wilson, director of the Institute for Employment Studies, said the number of people aged 50-65 who say they have left the workforce primarily for early retirement was now slightly lower than it was before the Covid outbreak, at around 1 million people, after a “largeish increase” during the pandemic.
He said a lot of people who retired during the pandemic did so in “relative financial comfort” compared with previous decades and were living off private pensions and savings. “They don’t need to come back and all the evidence suggests they probably won’t come back,” he said.
But, Wilson added: “There are so many more millions of older people who are out of work and want to work who would consider coming back, who’ve often got long-term health conditions, they’ve got care responsibilities or can’t find the right job or don’t know what the right job would be.
“We should be really talking to people about how we help them achieve what they want which is often to be back in decent work that is flexible, that is local, that is supportive … and think about how we design policy. I don’t think the issue is golf course membership or time spent on golf courses.”
Wilson said that unlike countries such as Germany, Britain does not have a public employment service, as Jobcentre Plus is mainly aimed at people on universal credit and only one in 10 people over 50 fall into that group. He also suggested reviewing the rules for early access to pensions.
The comments came on the day the Resolution Foundation, a leading thinktank, said Britain risks ending the decade with the lowest rates of workforce participation in almost 30 years, unless the government takes urgent action to reform childcare and help people with health conditions.
The business minister, Kevin Hollinrake, appearing before MPs in a subsequent session, noted that there had been a significant rise in economic inactivity since Covid, with an additional 500,000 people out of the labour force, and said the government was working on “making the workplace a more attractive place to be”.
The government is supporting a private member’s bill, brought by the Labour MP Yasmin Qureshi, allowing employees to request flexible working from day one in a job, which Hollinrake said would “shift the cultural needle”. However, this was “a right to request, not a right to insist”, he stressed, adding: “The more you put burdens on businesses, the fewer jobs there will be.” He also flagged the need for better, potentially shorter, apprenticeships and skills boot camps.
