The news that former England manager Roy Hodgson is the new manager of Watford Football Club at the grand old age of 74 has generated quite a lot of excitement.
Much of it, of course, is focused on his age – 74 is undoubtedly old for a Premiership Football manager, particularly when you consider he’ll be three times the age of his players. Don’t forget that when Sir Alex Ferguson retired as manager of Manchester United in 2013 he was 71, which is positively Jurassic in the land of football. Hodgson’s even older.
But we shouldn’t be surprised or indeed sceptical about this, because come 2050, chances are we’ll all be doing a Roy Hodgson. Not managing Watford, but working.
This is more out necessity than choice; we’ll probably need to work – just to keep the lights on. That’s because the state pension age is increasing: it’s already 66, but it’s on course to rise to 67 later this decade and it’ll be 68 as early as 2037. There’s a high probability that it will have to rise to 70 before long, which ironically where it all began back in 1908 under Lloyd-George’s first state pension.
The delay in the age at which we can get our pensions from the state is compounded by the massive shortfall in the level of savings required in private pension schemes. A recent Oxford Economics report for the financial services firm Hargreaves Lansdown showed that just 39.7 per cent of working-age households were on track to have a retirement income of £26,000 per person in today’s money (deemed by Loughborough University to be the comfortable amount to cover the bills and give a decent quality of life).
The shortage in saving for our old age isn’t a new problem of course; people have been worried about a lack of retirement saving for years. Unsurprisingly, older workers – and not just Roy Hodgson – are already either staying in the workforce or returning like never before. According to government figures just shy of 400,000 over-65s were in work of some sort back in 1984: now that figures is nearly 1.3 million. And that’s true for septuagenarians too, of which some 480,000 are in work today. That includes 149,000 men and women over 75, a figure that’s trebled since the early 1980s.
And it’s obvious why. They’re feeling the pinch. This was before the latest fuel price rises, let alone those coming in April, or the current rate of inflation, which at above five per cent, is at a 30-year high.
Then there’s the demographic timebomb. Britain’s population is forecast to reach 71 million in 2045, by which point the number of pensioners will have risen from 11.9 million today to more than 15 million. Of those, the 85+ age group will jump from 1.7 million to a little over 3 million people. In other words in 20 years there’ll be the equivalent of the population of Wales or 42 Westminster parliamentary constituencies of people age over 85.
It won’t just be mobility scooters that are in short supply then. Doubtless still saddled by several trillion of debt, the government will be faced with providing for the health and social care needs of these people. So it’s a fair bet that we can expect state pension provision in the future to be worse than it is today: possibly a lot worse, and quite possibly means tested. As it is today, the full whack of a state pension is a few pence short of £180 a week or about £10,000 a year – so the question you might rightly ask is, how low can it go?
The answer is lower. Oh yes, in 2050 it won’t be shop till you drop, but work till you flop. When I’ll be Roy Hodgson’s age in 2050, there will be millions of septuagenarians on the payroll.
If you’re like Roy, or a writer like me (I can type forever, so long as RSI or dementia don’t catch up first) – then you might be lucky enough to enjoy what you do. Keeping on going might not be so bad, if the work is available. But in the professions that require physical labour above and beyond the shifting of a mouse, or remembering to stand to stop the DVTs, then the options for older employees get more limited. It’s not hard to envisage a shortage of jobs to top up our overstretched pension pots.
Whether we like it or not, we’ll all be doing a Roy Hodgson and working into our 70s. The difference is, Hodgson is choosing to do something he loves. Our septuagenarian work options could easily feel a little more like a ball and chain. What’s certain is that we’ll look back on this generation’s set of middle class retirees as having lived through a golden age: final salary pensions, Saga cruises and plenty of time to spend on the garden are set to become a thing of the past.
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