Active Ageing in the European Union

Anyone interested in the field of age and work may be interested in this new book which explores the adoption of ‘active ageing’ policies by EU15 nations and the impact on older peoples’ work and retirement policy options.

The book, written by  Kate Hamblin a Research Fellow at the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, explores the labour market policies (including unemployment benefits, active labour market policies and partial pension receipt) and pension policies (pension principles, early retirement and incentives for deferral) adopted by these nations from the mid-1990s onwards.

Unfortunately the price, £55, puts it out of reach of most readers.

Further details at  http://www.palgrave.com/products/title.aspx?pid=534123

The Ready for Ageing Alliance – a new charity sector coalition

We note and welcome a new coalition, The Ready for Ageing Alliance, formed to increase the pressure on Government and all political parties to face up to the major changes and challenges from our rapidly ageing society.

Like other commentators we wish it every good fortune but we have reservations. Some of those reservations have been adequately expressed elsewhere and we link you below to Dick Stroud’s excellent blog 50-Plus Marketing on the subject.

http://20plus30.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/ready-for-ageing-alliance-will-it-make.html

We have long been asking for some statesmanlike approach to the subject of growing older but have seen very little so far. Indeed only this week we have seen major press coverage devoted to the exceedingly trivial issue of who should or should not receive free bus passes and TV licences. This does no credit to the media nor to the politicians involved but does highlight the very poor level of debate currently taking place.

Although the participating bodies in this new alliance are all much esteemed they do, in my opinion, have a fatal weakness – they are mainly concerned with today’s existing old, not tomorrow’s. As such they do not feature all that highly in most people’s consciousness.

The real way to get people involved in ageing issues is to make today’s young realise that this is coming for them, like it or not, and any change now will be for their benefit. And if they want improvement they must take personal and collective responsibility for their futures. Therefore, I would argue for a somewhat different mix of pressure groups to extend the sphere of influence.

Unready for ageing

Although there is nothing new in the House of Lord’s “Ready for Ageing” report published yesterday, it is a useful summary of the issues which our society now faces in relation to changing demographics. And, as the report highlights, it is not just society’s problem, or the government’s, but one about which we must all take greater personal responsibility.

The report recommends, amongst much else, that the 2015 government establishes two Commissions – one to consider the financial aspects of our ageing population and the other to focus on health and social care. However, having pointed out elsewhere in the report that employer and societal attitudes – and lack of flexibility – continue to impact older people’s ability to work longer, I believe there should also be a third Commission to focus urgently on this aspect.

We need a change in attitudes overall to ensure that older people aren’t seen as dependent, needy and a liability but are recognised for what the majority are – active, contributing citizens. Let’s hope that this report leads to action – and isn’t just yesterday’s news.

The report can be downloaded here: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201213/ldselect/ldpublic/140/140.pdf 

It can also be browsed here: http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/ld201213/ldselect/ldpublic/140/14002.htm

Dealing with the reality of living for a hundred years

A new report from Scottish Widows predicts that a third of babies born today will live to be 100 and, as a norm, will work until the age of 70. Girls are more likely to reach this age – 39 per cent – compared to boys (32 per cent).

There’s something of a fairy-tale quality about the phrase “living for a hundred years” and thinking about the implications shows that a good fairy with a magic wand might be required for ensuring a long and happy life for today’s babies who are going to experience such longevity.

The report anticipates that as people face the challenge of saving for their first home and paying off student loans (which at around £73,000 will take until average age 52), ‘an increasing proportion will either have no children or just one child’.  

They will also need to find money to save for a pension and to continue to work longer in some capacity in order to fund living comfortably for the longest anticipated retirements in history – up to three decades.

Naturally (as it comes from a financial products provider) the report’s main message is that these ‘new centenarians’ will need to start saving at the age of 25 to build up a decent pension to have any chance of being able to retire comfortably.

However, surely it is simplistic to think that this will be sufficient to deal with a change of such magnitude? It seems to me that innovation will be required in a number of areas, including:

·  Housing – in terms of both assisting younger people to get on the housing   ladder, and more flexible options for helping older people free up housing equity.

·  Education – a review of our current ‘university education at any cost’ culture and a greater emphasis on life-long learning

·  Working patterns – making part-time, flexible and contract roles throughout the career-span the norm, thereby enabling people to dip in and out of the workplace more easily – and to extend their working lives.

·  Spending patterns – a review of priorities e.g. although divorce rates remain high it is predicted that young centenarians will spend around £39,000 on their wedding (compared to their grandparents average of£4,400)!

· Attitudes to healthy living – to ensure that those later years are spent in some kind of good, or at least moderate, health.

Commenting on the report, leading economist and trend forecaster Steve Lucas of Development Economics suggests that today’s parents “should encourage their children to start understanding finance and stress the importance of saving from a young age”.

This sounds a worthy strategy but might it be undermined by the reality of today’s parents neither understanding financial matters sufficiently themselves, nor having the ability and/or will to save for their own old age?http://reference.scottishwidows.co.uk/docs/2012_11_new_centenarians.pdf

However, before anyone becomes too smug or complacent, other indications suggest that the pensions industry is already planning for anticipated life spans of 125 years!

Choice and consequences in the fight for a healthy old age

Constantly we read sweeping and often misleading generalizations in the press about today’s over 50s. Take these two articles which appeared in one recent issue of the Daily Mail:

First was a story about the development of a new ‘polypill’ which Professor Sir Nicholas Wald of the University of London maintains should be given to all over-50s to prevent heart attacks and strokes. Tests showed that taking the tablet every day for 12 weeks gives those in their  fifties, sixties and seventies the blood pressure and cholesterol  levels of twentysomethings.

The proposal is that we should all be taking it. ‘It is specifically designed for healthy people to keep them healthy,’ the professor commented. ‘It is like taking anti-malarials if you are going to Africa – you take them in order to reduce your chance of contracting the disease.’

The second story focused on the rise of eating disorders in older women which apparently have increased by 42 per cent in the past 11 years — leading to all kinds of health problems such as osteoporosis, heart, liver, digestive and gastro-intestinal problems, not to mention depression. Surprisingly, women over 50 — average age 69 — comprise 78 per cent of all deaths from anorexia.

So, on one hand we are all thought to be eating and lazing our way to disaster and in need of mass preventative treatments that will keep us physically as young as in our twenties, and on the other we – women at least – are being criticized for wanting to counteract the signs of ageing and being told to resign ourselves to the inevitable: “our mothers at [this] age would have slipped into a skirt with an elasticated waist and indulged in another cake,” the journalist comments.

While the author of this piece maintained that a desire to emulate impossibly beautiful women celebrities has led to a new anxiety and discontent in older women, I don’t think it’s that simple.
One of the biggest challenges for us all today as we age is that we have unprecedented amounts of choice.  And exercising that choice and making those decisions about what we want and need and have to do is hard.

Should we choose to take the easy option and decide that polypill protection is an easier path than living a healthy lifestyle?  And should we, men and women, choose to disregard aspirational role models that perhaps in earlier years encouraged us to up our game and slump into invisible comfort rather than taking a robust stance against some of the unwelcome signs of ageing such as grey hair, increased weight and lack of flexibility?

As a nation of elders it’s surely time we grew up, got a grip and took greater responsibility for ourselves and our futures – physical, financial and emotional – so that attitudes such as this become irrelevant.

Yes, we’re ageing, and yes it isn’t always all great,  but aren’t we lucky to be alive for longer to enjoy it?

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-2175493/Polypills-Why-50s-offered-slash-risk-strokes-heart-attacks.html#ixzz213UC4fPX

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-2175610/An-obsession-looking-Fab-Fifty-rise-older-women-eating-disorders.html#ixzz213TiTzBe

The European Year of Active Ageing

In case you hadn’t yet noticed:-

“2012 is the (European Commission’s) European Year of Active Ageing and Solidarity between Generations. A chance for all of us to reflect on how Europeans are living longer and staying healthier than ever before  – and to realise the opportunities that represents.

Active ageing can give the baby-boom generation and tomorrow’s older adults the opportunity to:

     stay in the workforce and share their experience

     keep playing an active role in society

     live as healthy and fulfilling lives as possible.

It is also key to maintaining solidarity between generations in societies with rapidly increasing numbers of older people.”

This is how it is described on their website. For more see

http://europa.eu/ey2012/ey2012main.jsp?catId=971&langId=en

Last week, on 6 March, we attended the UK launch of this major initiative with many fine speakers and a TV link-up to the relevant EU Commissioner. Quite why the launch of “2012 as the year of” should take place in March I am not quite sure.

More from the website states:

“The challenge for politicians and stakeholders will be to improve opportunities for active ageing in general and for living independently, acting in areas as diverse as employment, health care, social services, adult learning, volunteering, housing, IT services or transport.

The European Year seeks to raise awareness of the issues and the best ways of dealing with them. But most of all it seeks to encourage all policymakers and stakeholders to set themselves goals and take action to meet them. 2012 should go beyond debating; it should start bringing tangible results.”

Unfortunately, a few things stand out.

There were very few politicians, policymakers or employers, as major stakeholders, in attendance. Furthermore, a number of the speakers complained of “pilotitis” or “projectitis” a phenomenon whereby things are started while money and enthusiasm exist, then fall by the wayside until they are eventually re-invented sometime later. And, the continuing problem of lack of clarity about the needs of different groups of older people was once again apparent. Without revisiting old ground, 50 year-olds are different to 80 year-olds!

Obviously it is early days in the year, well early-ish, so maybe more will emerge.

If you wish to “get involved” or would like to suggest appropriate initiatives, do check out their website.

How can we discuss ageing and retirement without a meaningful vocabulary?

I have often said that we need a new vocabulary to adequately describe the current changes that are affecting our lives in terms of longevity and extended working lives. This was accentuated last week at two events I attended on two consecutive days on the topic of retirement, health and well-being.  The first, at TAEN addressed the question Does Retirement Damage your Health?  while the second, an ESRC seminar in the excellent Re-thinking Retirement series, considered Activity, Unpaid Work and Active Ageing.

Both seminars were informative and thought-provoking, addressing a number of topics such as identity, job quality, the meaning of productive activity, motivation to work, subjective assessments of well-being and the role of continuous learning. However, at two levels, both also were ultimately frustrating.  First, insufficient attention was paid to addressing the range of objective and subjective experiences relating to retirement today, such that the first seminar really should have been entitled Does Working Longer Damage your Health?   Second, a failure to clearly define “older people” meant that the experiences of those within the fifty year age span of “older” were presented as if the factors relevant to the young old and those of significance to the elderly scarcely require distinguishing.

At every level and in every forum addressing these two issues, correctly defining who and what is under examination is essential.  Unlike birth or death “retirement” is not an unconditional experience. It has now become so varied in form and duration that in much the same way as the Inuit people have many words for snow, we too need a range of new labels to accurately represent different types of retirement and extending working. 

We also need absolute clarity about who we are referring to if we are to not to end up with unhelpful generalizations and irrelevant stereotypes.  Although chronological age is not a useful marker (a fit and active ninety year old may be more active than an unhealthy and sedentary sixty year old), we nevertheless need clear differentiation in terms of nomenclature between those who are arguably still enjoying their most active and powerful years, and those who are in decline and in need of support.

Another seminar at the ILC later this week Changing the Perception of Retirement will no doubt add some further interesting insights, contributing to changing people’s behaviours towards work and retirement.  It bodes especially well that in the seminar outline older people are described as “a very heterogeneous group”.

http://taen.org.uk/events/view/32/Does-Retirement-Damage-your-Health

http://www.rethinkingretirement.org/activity.html

http://www.ilcuk.org.uk/index.php/events/ilc_uk_and_the_actuarial_profession_debate_changing_the_perception_of

 

Grown up actors for grown up audiences

A host of Hollywood stars set a great example of what it looks like to be older today at the AARP The Magazine Movies for Grown-Ups Awards held recently at the Beverly Wilshire Four Seasons hotel in Los Angeles.

Veteran actors, male and female were out in force to show their support at the prize-giving ceremony, which honoured the best of Tinseltown’s older stars.

Pictures of stars such as Sharon Stone, Meryl Streep, Janet McTeer and Glenn Close underlined that in terms of both ability and elegance, older actors are still very much at the top of their game. Let’s hope writers and producers are smart enough to realise and address the still largely untapped potential for films for grown-ups, featuring grown-ups.

 
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-2097542/Sharon-Stone-Meryl-Streep-Glenn-Close-age-grace-awards-bash-veteran-movie-stars.html#ixzz1lms6HpaS

Do you want it fast or do you want it right?

A recent report in Scientific American leads one to conclude that older people might be better going for speed rather than accuracy in workplace decision making in order to refute ageist stereotypes about declining performance.

Apparently scientists administered over 60 visual tests to both undergraduates and adults. In one, a computer screen showed an array of asterisks and the subjects had to choose as fast as they could whether there were between 31 and 50 or between 51 and 70. In a second test, the subjects saw a string of letters and had to quickly decide whether the letters spelled a real English word or not.

The researchers found little difference in accuracy between the younger and older subjects, although undergraduates had significantly faster response times. But the older participants’ slower response times were not all the result of a decline in skills. In other tests, the older subjects were encouraged to decide faster, and their response times greatly decreased with hardly any loss of accuracy.

The researchers think that a greater desire to avoid mistakes therefore may make the elderly (“older folks” as they are charmingly termed) more deliberate. Or, one wonders, is it a generational thing – a result of having the old adage: More haste less speed drummed into us from an early age?

http://www.scientificamerican.com/podcast/episode.cfm?id=the-elderly-react-slowly-because-th-11-12-31

A rose by any other name

Last evening we went to the formal launch of The Employers Network for Equality and Inclusion (enei) at the Globe Theatre in London. This organisation incorporates The Employers Forum on Age and The Employers Forum on Belief and extends its scope to cover many other forms of diversity and discrimination (“a logical step” according to Caroline Waters Director of People and Policy at BT). We wish it well.

Among those we met there were some familiar faces who work in the same field as us together with many interesting people who represent other aspects of diversity – their issues and priorities were similar to ours but noticeably different.

In his Keynote speech Trevor Phillips, Chair of the Equality and Human Rights Commission, appealing in particular to employers, made the following fundamental observation. The lobbying now has largely been done and the enabling legislation is now in place. That phase is now complete. The talking can now stop. The next phase is to develop and implement solutions, in the workplace and in society at large.

We endorse that view wholeheartedly and also believe that employers are the “gatekeepers” to change taking place. Without significant movement by them nothing substantial will be achieved.

And while it may be convenient to lump together all forms of diversity (and where does the scope of diversity and discrimination start and end?) it may be optimistic for one organisation such as enei to believe it has the expertise to develop the detailed solutions to a whole raft of different situations and issues. As an umbrella organisation it may be fine but broad brush remedies will not be enough. Let us hope that enei uses appropriate, focused expertise to deal with each particular diversity arena.

 

 

 

Reinventing not rusting

I was delighted to come across the following slogan describing the new approach to active, productive retirement: “If you rest you rust”.

In a few succinct words it exactly describes the perils of slowing down, giving up and ceasing to be active in later life.

Ageing and retirement shouldn’t represent a ‘more of the same’ scenario for anyone. While it’s understandable to want to take a somewhat more measured pace to life and work than in the past, retirement today should focus more on reinvention than rest.

Doing something enjoyable is stimulating and energising. Finding and pursuing what that is in order to avoid the physical and mental symptoms of slowly rusting away must be our number one priority in later life. 

Being older in our time?

Who remembers the TV documentary series Seven Up, arguably one of the first reality TV shows? The idea on which it was based was simple but radical: to follow 14 children from across society from their first appearance at age seven, revisiting them every seven years as they progressed through life.

Launched in 1963 by Granada Television, the first programme was followed by 7 Plus Seven in 1970, 21 Up in ’77, 28 Up in ’84, 35 Up in ’91, 42 Up in ’99 and 49 Up in 2006.  

The series asked the children (and later their adult selves) about their lives and their dreams for the future and examined how these developed or changed every seven years.

The reason for making the initial programme, according to the series’ director Michael Apted, was that “the early sixties was a time of radical social change when there were all these questions about whether English society was going through serious volcanic changes with the Wilson government and the cultural revolution as it were, you know, with The Beatles, The Stones, Mary Quant and all that”.

Over the years the changes that occurred to the original 14 (some of whom dropped out of the project) were fascinating and often tragic. Success, failure, marriage and childbirth, poverty, illness – almost every possible facet of the human experience was revealed.

Now, as longevity, technology and globalization are arguably heralding a new period of social change, it would be great to repeat the experiment starting with a group of individuals aged 49. Not the same ones as in Seven Up (their life experiences will have been affected too greatly by their involvement in the programme), but a new and diverse group of individuals representing all facets of contemporary British society.

Such a programme would be a fascinating way to explore what it means to be older in twenty-first century Britain and to see how people’s views of what their old age will be like and what they would and wouldn’t like to see happen actually develop.

At a time when our society still lumps together “older people” asone fiftyyear cohort, it would be a hugely enlightening way of examining the intricacies of ageing.