The move will be needed by 2068 if the Government is to retain the pension ‘triple lock’, while also keeping state pension costs below 6 per cent of national income, the Institute for Fiscal Studies has said.
Over a quarter of people aged 65 are unfit to work, said Professor Alan Walker, a sociologist at the University of Sheffield. “So simply raising pension ages will not work for them. It would add to their problems because of the delay in access to the pension.”
Denmark has recently raised the state pension age up to 70 from the year 2040.
It is undeniable that average life expectancy has been generally increasing in most countries over the 20th and 21st centuries, although in the past decade or so the rise has slowed and perhaps plateaued.
But the driver for raising the retirement age has not been people’s personal life expectancy but an economic one.
Some jobs can be more satisfying than others (Photo: Richard Drury/Getty Images/Digital Vision)
When it comes to people’s ability to last until retirement age, and have some good quality years between retirement and ill health, we don’t just need to consider people’s lifespan but also their “health span”, said Professor Richard Faragher, a gerontologist at the University of Brighton.
Unfortunately, the rise in lifespan over the past couple of decades has not been matched by parallel rises in their health span, according to a 2021 House of Lords report called Ageing: Science, Technology and Healthy Living.
For females, health span actually fell by 0.2 years over the same period, while lifespan rose by 0.6 years.
People with lower incomes, who tend to need the state pension more than their peers, are more likely to be doing physical jobs and may have to stop work earlier as their bodies can no longer cope. “Ill health tends to force people in lower socio-economic strata to retire earlier than they would wish to,” said Professor Faragher.
Sense of purpose
A job can also provide mental challenges, and doctors generally recommend trying to keep up intellectual stimulation to help stay sharp. It may even lower the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia.
“Working in later life should always be a personal choice, not one people are pushed into to survive,” said Morgan Vine, Director of Policy and Influencing at Independent Age.
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But Professor David Gems, a biogerontologist at University College London, is sceptical. “That is a biology-free extrapolation, assuming that things will just carry on into the future, which is completely unrealistic,” he said.
“The harsh and brutal reality is that we have an ever-increasing population of older people and fewer younger people.”
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