The truth about ageing




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The truth about ageing

A bright future beckons in which we will be as sprightly at 70 as we are at 50 - but only for a minority

By Will Hutton, The Observer
October 5, 2003

It was my great-aunt a year or two before her death who taught me a truth about the old. They are the young, only in ageing bodies. At 91, she had decided to put on a show for her eightysomething male visitor - and into her living-room she came, although stooped with years and very frail, cutting a dash in her tailored Jaeger jacket and skirt, with carefully judged make-up.

She was a 91-year-old beauty - and the sexual electricity crackled between these two old people. Even at that age, we never give up; life is for living right to the end. It is an universal urge and age an universal scourge. Everyone's body is giving out; we are all looking into the mirror feeling the same spirit as we did when we were teenagers and gazing bleakly at the ravages of time.

It is no consolation to know that ageing is what gives life meaning because it makes it finite. We still want to live fully to the end; to make the impact at 91 we made at 21, the age my great-aunt said she felt all her life.

The crisis is that in an era of ever greater inequalities, the greatest inequality of all is what is happening to the old. The trite new headline is that as life expectancy rises - men now live to 75 and women to 80, up some seven or eight years since the 1960s - 60 has become the new 50. Better health care, better drugs, better hygiene, better living standards and more wealth have meant that the ageing process has been deferred.

Scarcely a week goes by without a report saying that the over-55s are joining health clubs in droves, going on gap years like their children or that more over-65s are working harder than ever. A bright new future beckons, in which age is being fought back, and we will be as sprightly at 70 as we were at 50.

The problem is that this is only true for a minority. Professional men now live nine-and-a-half years longer than unskilled manual workers, the widest gap on record. The death rates for under- 65s in our poorest urban areas are two-and-half-times higher than in our richest areas. The metropolitan talk is of working well into your sixties and the vital importance of lifting mandatory retirement at 65; the lived reality is nearly half of men between 55 and 65 can't find work.

The gift of living well into your sixties and seventies is being enjoyed by the better off while those on lower incomes are decades behind in their expectation of not just life, but quality of life. It is a source of unfairness that is posing the greatest challenge to our institutional arrangements ever - and which threatens to become one of the hottest and most bitterly contested political issues around.

Last week, pensions joined Iraq and foundation hospitals as one of the flash-points of the Labour Party conference. From council-tax rebates for the elderly to compelling companies to make pension-fund contributions, the question of how to be fair to the old is rising in importance. But solutions have to be fair to the young as well. A declining birth rate means that the flow of new young workers to support the profits and taxes out of which higher pensions and council-tax rebates will be paid is falling.

How fair is it on them to pay higher taxes and forgo wage rises just because they live in a society which is ageing and didn't save enough 20 or 30 years ago to provide for its retirement today? Everywhere you look in this debate, issues of equity and morality loom large.

One of the reasons the Conservative Party is in such a mess is that its reflex response to these questions - choice, low taxes and privatisation - is self-evidently inadequate. You cannot privatise how society wants to organise the quality of life as we age.

The majority in any democracy will not countenance walking away from these issues, constructing only a minimalist framework or leaving it up to the hazards of individual choice and individual saving, not least because the majority knows it needs some robust framework in its own best interest. The only way through the maze is to try to hang on to some universal framework through which we collectively navigate our way as we age, but to make it as flexible as possible because of our differential experience. (framework:structure)

Here, New Labour is stumbling towards some half-reasonable answers. One of the best policy pronouncements of last week was from Andrew Smith, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, confirming the innovative plan of offering those who defer their state pension by five years a lump sum of £30,000. Those who can work will work longer and be rewarded by the lump sum; but that will leave more pension resources available for those who can't work and opt for their pension, which now can be increased as fewer will be receiving it. (defer:ajourner)

It is a smart and equitable way of dealing with the new reality; it sustains the principle of the universal pension but builds crucial flexibility into how it is administered. If enough people defer their pension, it may even allow the state pension for early retirees to be pitched at a reasonable level.

The same approach has to be applied elsewhere. The fairest way of relieving pressure on the dwindling workforce is aggressively to insist that age discrimination cease, so that those over- 55s have a reasonable chance of working.

But there has to be honesty that many over-65 shouldn't be expected or asked to work. Companies should discharge their responsibility to their pension funds, but there has to be flexibility in how they deal with the vast pension-fund deficits they have inherited from the past. The cash has to come from somewhere; every pound contributed to narrow a pension-fund deficit is a pound that could have been deployed in higher wages or more investment.

How much should today's workers suffer for past mistakes? The only equitable policy is to establish a government-backed universal fund that supports particular pension-fund deficits.

This will, of course, be expensive; sustaining universality as we live longer and deal with the errors of the past, even if we do so flexibly, is likely to imply higher taxes. There is a limit to the kind of self-financing ruse Andrew Smith announced last week.

Yet this speaks to a deep truth. Turning a blind eye to the growing inequalities of those of working age is hard enough. Doing the same when it means indifference to something at the heart of our experience - how we age - is impossible. It is the old who will revive social democracy.