Matthew Tinsley: Helping older workers

Matthew Tinsley is an economics and social policy research fellow at Policy Exchange.  Follow Matthew on Twitter.

Few topics in British public policy attract cross-party consensus. However on extending working lives successive Governments seem to have agreed - we all need to work for longer.

Following Lord Turner’s pensions report, Labour chose to increase the State Pension Age to 68 by 2050. George Osborne has proposed going further by linking the State Pension Age to life expectancy, reflecting the reality that the cost of living longer cannot be entirely borne by the taxpayer.

These changes have not been without controversy. A campaign, 68 is too late, has begun to fight against increases in the pension age, and some commentators have joined this position, wrongly trying to portray working later in life as a source of intergenerational conflict. This position depicts  “job-hogging” older workers as an obstacle to younger workers struggling to enter the workforce.