The good and bad news about
employing the over fifties 
                                   October 2004

• However, substantial regional and local variations remain in employment rates for older people and in the number who are economically inactive, with areas like the North East and Wales having particularly high levels of inactivity.

• The relatively low levels of employment among older workers costs the economy ?19-?31 billion a year, mostly in lost output but also because of reduced taxes and increased welfare payments.

• Around 2.7 million people between 50 and state pension age do not work.

• Currently, almost half of these are receiving incapacity benefits, many on a long-term basis.

• Between 700,000 and one million of those currently inactive say they would like to work, with some 200,000 seeking employment, although they are confronted by one or more barriers to finding a job.
   

The National Audit Office (NAO) report examines the progress that has been made in helping older people overcome the barriers to employment. These barriers include relatively low levels of skills, age discrimination by some employers, health problems, low confidence and negative attitudes to employment.

The NAO found that a scheme specifically for older workers - New Deal 50 Plus - has helped more than 120,000 people into work at an estimated cost of ?270 million, although an unknown number of these people would have found jobs anyway.

Other employment and training programmes (in particular, the New Deal 25 Plus and Work Based Learning for Adults) have helped a further 70,000 older people into work over the last five years.

Jobcentre Plus is increasing the flexibility within its programmes in order to better meet the individual needs of people facing acute or multiple barriers to work. This includes piloting new approaches to help people claiming incapacity benefits return to work.

The report notes that older people still have relatively low levels of participation in most forms of training and education, which they need in order to compete more effectively in the labour market. They are also under-represented in their use of Information, Advice and Guidance Partnerships, which are a valuable source of help for people who are out of work.

The report also identifies age discrimination on the part of some employers as an ongoing and significant problem. Legislation to outlaw such discrimination is expected in October 2006 but there has been a delay in issuing the draft regulations for consultation.

However the Government has announced a national guidance campaign in advance of the legislation to further enable employers to adopt age positive employment practices and to encourage the recruitment, training and retention of older workers.

We at www.laterlife.com  support Age Positive, the Government campaign to encourage older people back to work.

For more information, see the NAO website at www.nao.org.uk 

 

laterlife interest

The above article is part of the features section of laterlife.com called laterlife interest. laterlife interest contains a variety of articles of interest for visitors to laterlife.com written by a number of experienced and new journalists.

It includes both one off articles and also regular columns of a more specialist nature such as healthwise, reports from the REACH files, and a beauty section called looking good in later life.

Also don't forget to take a look at our regular IT question and answer section called YoucandoIT by IT trainer and author Jackie Sherman.

To view the latest articles and indexes to previous articles click on laterlife interest here or above.  To search for articles about a certain topic, use the site search feature below.

back to laterlife interest

Site map and site search