The dangers of longevity

All of this affects society well beyond the “traditional” issues we think of when we think of ageing – we need to think about the very nature of our society itself. With the help of the briefing paper “One hundred not out: a route map for long lives” from the International Longevity Centre, here’s six key stats on how UK society is changing and what it might mean.

1. We are living longer 

Headlines in recent years that UK life expectancy has stalled are not wrong, but the longer run trend is absolutely unmistakeable. A 50-year old in 1950 could expect on average to live for just under another 25 years. By 2010, that had risen to just under 33 years. 

That’s an extra eight years of life for each 50-year-old, which is sizeable enough, but across society that means millions of extra older adults. That is why there are more old people around, and why more of them have complex health needs – you have more health issues on average at 80 (if you make it) than 70, after all.

This means there are fewer working age adults for every pensioner. It is working adults that pay the overwhelming majority of the taxes which fund the NHS, social care, and state pensions: contrary to myth, no-one has “paid into their state pension pot” – today’s economic activity pays today’s pensions.

More pensioners and fewer workers means that a shrinking workforce is supporting an expanding number of retirees. But the numbers are even trickier than the top line figures suggest.

2. We are spending less of our lives working than once we did

If the retirement age doesn’t increase but life expectancy does, we will spend a smaller portion of our life working – this holds true if the retirement age rises more slowly than life expectancy too. 

But the trend in the UK is even more dramatic than this would suggest, because more and more of us delay joining the workforce to go to university (and fewer students work alongside their studies). 

This means that in the UK, the proportion of our lives we spend working has dropped dramatically, which is not a universal trend – it has even dropped in recent years, hitting 31.1 years by 2022. That once again increases the burden on those in work.

3. We’re working less because we’re in bad health

The people of the UK aren’t lazy – we’re often just too sick to work, especially if we’re also poor. Thirty-five-to-39-year-olds in the lowest income bracket have health comparable to rich 70-year-olds, meaning they are often simply unable to work for long periods for health reasons. More than 1.6 million over-50s leave the workforce due to ill health.

The UK’s poor management of long-term sickness is genuinely shocking – leaving people’s healthy life expectancies dramatically shorter than their actual lives, meaning people spend decades too ill to work or else participate as they might hope in society. This is concentrated in deprived areas, some of which perform markedly worse than some of the poorest countries in the world.

4. We don’t compare that well internationally

Almost every developing country is facing the same challenges as the UK – falling birth rate, longer life expectancy and thus an ageing population. But many of the others still have the average adult working several more years than the UK. These include Iceland (which has the highest total years worked in the world), Sweden and Norway, but also countries like Israel, Singapore and China.

5. The family relationships of older adults are changing, too

It is still easy to assume that most young people will have adult children around to look after them – but this is increasingly not the case. The number of older adults who have never had children is rising rapidly, from 1.2 million to an expected 2 million by 2030. 

That has implications for keeping older adults involved in society, but also in how they will access care and stay independent. These are compounded by the fact that we have children later than we used to (the average age of a woman having her first baby has increased four years since 1975). 

All of this matters for care, but it also matters for wealth: the combination of longer life expectancy and older adults means that inheritance now often comes when adults are over 50 themselves, rather than setting them up to buy a family home as they have their own children. 

All of this is before considering the effect of turning what is currently a vast generational wealth gap into an intra-generational one – in which your prospects of success as a millennial or Gen Z-er depends on whether or not your parents died rich.

6. Wealth is concentrated in the hands of older adults, and is getting ever-more so

We know that older people have more wealth than younger ones – this is often largely a result of the fact they are far likelier to own their homes outright, and they generally have amassed savings for retirement. But the extent to which this is the case is changing dramatically, even over the course of a decade.

In 2010, the over-65s had just over a third of the UK’s wealth. By 2019, this has risen to more than half. The under-40s meanwhile had just 7.5% of the UK’s wealth in 2010, falling to less than 4% in 2019. 

Put simply, this cannot be tenable: people need capital to invest in their futures. It is essential for setting up a secure home, it is often a requirement people want before starting a family, and it is wealth that allows people to train for new professions or start new businesses. 

In other words, the tiny sliver of wealth held by the under-40s must serve as part of the explanation for the UK’s economic stagnation – people are waiting decades for their lives to start, and are unable to take risks or try new things because they simply lack any savings to back them up to do so.

Inheritance is not working as a mechanism for redistributing wealth. It is intrinsically unevenly and unfairly distributed, it is ineffectively taxed (and is easy to avoid), and it is passed on ever later in life. Without some means of at least modest distribution of wealth across the age ranges, working age adults will be unable to generate enough growth to fund their own lifestyles – let alone to keep funding pensions, health care and more.

The people of the UK are living longer lives, but they are not healthier lives, and we have not considered how to either address that or adapt society to better serve that reality. If we do not start taking this issue seriously, it will lead to serious failings for us all – not just those in their seventh decade or beyond.