‘Where have all the workers gone?” asked a House of Lords report last month. The title evokes an image of peers looking around crossly for the 565,000 missing economically active people in much the same way I do for my nail clippers, but actually, the report is perfectly sensible and interesting. It covers Brexit and ill-health, but the trend that emerges most strongly is a reversal of the previous long-term one: people in the 50-to-64 age bracket are leaving the labour market. Spin the wheel of over-analysed work microtrends and you might not have expected to land on “silver quitting” (another report went for “the great retirement”, less catchily), but a growing body of evidence suggests that is exactly what has happened in Britain.
Why? It doesn’t look, from the research, as if it’s a question of ill-health or that they were pushed out; rather, it’s mainly “a lifestyle choice”. “These people express no desire to work and do not expect to work again” as the lords put it. That “great retirement” report, from the longer-life thinktank Phoenix Insights, also found “the main reason people in the UK were leaving the workforce was because they no longer wanted to work”. Predictably, it’s middle and higher earners, and two-thirds are mortgage-free; you need financial security to make that kind of lifestyle choice.
