For as long as I can remember, and probably a long time before that, ‘our ageing society’ has been a ubiquitous phrase. Despite recent wobbles, life expectancy is far higher than it was a couple of generations ago, and more people are working for longer too. Many of the consequences for social policy are widely debated and sometimes acted on: witness the abolition of so-called default (ie forced) retirement ages in 2011, and the ‘review and increase’ story of the qualifying age for the state pension.
What has received much less attention, however, is the way that the wider social security system deals with an ageing population of claimants. The unexamined flipside of higher pension ages is the prolonging of ‘working-age’ status. For all women, and indeed for poorer men with means-tested entitlements, the move out of ‘working age’ used to happen at 60, but is now 66 and rising. The movement of the large 1960s birth cohort into and through their sixties redoubles the consequences. More relatively older people will now be subject to those strict work-search requirements which are, in the absence of special circumstances, a condition of receiving Universal Credit. All this makes it pertinent to ask whether the detailed rules of the benefit system and the operation of employment support is serving 60-somethings as well as they should.
The expertise of the Social Security Advisory Committee (SSAC), as well as the access it enjoys to the Department for Work and Pensions and the jobcentre network, makes it especially well-placed to press this question. That’s why I am delighted that – as part of the Committee’s independent work programme – we are launching an inquiry to this end.
Our initial reconnaissance points to starting with an exploration of the chief barriers to work facing older people. These might include age-related health issues, caring duties (including grandparenting) and employer reluctance to hire older workers, whether out of simple prejudice or out of potentially rational doubts, such as about the difficulties of recouping investment in training. Such difficulties with employers may be most of an issue with new prospective employers, who may also be less inclined to make reasonable adjustments for other barriers than they are in the case of workers that they have known for a long time. This makes it important to consider not only how far the system supports older claimants in finding work, but more particularly whether it does enough to support them in keeping any connection with an employer that they already have.
Building on an approach successfully deployed by SSAC in recent research on the way that benefits interact with the participation decisions of young people, we envisage drawing up an illustrative selection of case studies of 60-somethings living in different circumstances, and explore how far working extra hours or working at all pays for them once all the consequences for benefits are taken into account. The different rules for means-tested benefits for those who are deemed beyond ‘working age’ could also be interesting: is the system doing all that it could to support those pensioners who do want to work?
As well as benefit rules, we wish to examine Jobcentre practice. What offer is made to older claimants? What support is available to older non-claimants who are seeking employment? How much tolerance is there or isn’t there for individuals to work part-time or with variable hours, potentially a good way for claimants to stay employed despite the barriers that they face?
As well as working closely with officials and Jobcentre staff, we are, through a series of roundtable discussions, gauging the views of employers, charities, unions, academics and others in civil society about what does and doesn’t work in the existing system. These discussions are proving to be valuable not only in elucidating the current system, but also in sourcing answers to the one question that matters most. Namely, how might things be improved?
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