Getting a job after 50 is easier said than done

I am fed up with the government claiming that half a million professionals aged over 50 are reluctant to get back to work. They make it sound like we’re all on cruises, gardening or watching telly. But have they actually tried getting a job after the age of 50?

I’m not doing nothing, I hasten to add. Part-time, I run a successful, if tiny, NGO, producing plays with refugees. Our work is studied at universities all over the US and Europe. I write books and screenplays and I once made a film that got into Cannes. But none of this has yet translated into the security provided by cold hard cash, so I spend half my time applying for jobs.

I have had dozens of interviews over the past two years. I always get down to the last three, but never any further. Though I’ve been a journalist for 35 years and have an Oxford degree and a postgraduate diploma, no one wants my ideas and my experience – or they don’t want to pay for it. I was headhunted by Deloitte, in 2020, to work as a consultant in the Middle East. Despite signing a contract, that job fell into a Covid-shaped hole and never reappeared.

Part of the problem is the perception of over-fifties’ expectations. I’ve had prospective employers say: ‘We’d have to pay you £250,000 a year, and we can’t afford it.’ When I say ‘I’d be perfectly happy with £75,000’, they sound shocked: ‘But that’s what we pay the 30-year-olds!’

Or they say: ‘How hard do you actually want to work?’ The answer is: very hard.

Or I hear: ‘We worry you’d just be bored.’