THE JOYS OF ‘UNRETIRING’
Why Britain is going back to work
In January 2016 Inspector Brendan McCambridge retired from the British Transport Police after 26 years of loyal service. During his time he had been present at the Paddington Rail disaster and the 7/7 bombings in London where he was one of the first emergency responders on the scene at King’s Cross station and received a bravery commendation for searching among the dead for secondary devices.
The grandfather-of-two’s retirement plan was straight out of the pages of Saga magazine: redecorate the house; spend time with Lesley his wife of 15 years; buy a boat and while away happy days fishing for rainbow trout. But after only a few months of this restful bliss he hit a snag.
“The walls close in, they really do,” says McCambridge, 56, who lives near Wokingham in Berkshire. “I found I was missing out on the camaraderie and while I was getting up for a purpose, that purpose was solely my own. You feel old before your time.”
Soon the freezer filled up with fish and he found himself sitting at home bored waiting for his wife to return from her job as a care home manager.
And so, McCambridge did something ever more retirees are now choosing to do: he went back to work.
A new authoritative study published last week by researchers at King’s College London and the University of Manchester, has found a quarter of British workers actually change their minds once they have given up their careers and decide to “unretire”.
According to the study, the most exhaustive of its kind ever undertaken in the UK, most unretirees decide to go back to work within the first five years of retirement. Men were more likely to unretire than women, and healthy people more likely to do so than those with illnesses.
While the study did not ask why people returned to work, previous research suggests those who unretire do so for social reasons rather than a simple need to improve their finances.
Some discover suddenly finding themselves treated as a limitless fountain of free childcare for grandchildren is far more anxiety-inducing then any boardroom presentation. Others feel they have lost part of their identity.
So it was for Brendan McCambridge who in June 2016 applied for his customer services job at the Henley branch of Waitrose (his fiveberth boat Mary-Rita is moored not far away). For the first six months of his new contract he opted to work full-time driving deliveries and working on the shop floor. Now he does about 30 hours a week and takes home just over £1,000 a month on top of his police pension.
“My wife calls it our holiday fund,” he says. “For her it’s great, she has the old me back. When I was sitting around at home I would just get grumpy. I’ve also lost five stone since working here. This is like a vitality camp for me.”
Britain’s rapidly ageing population has long been a cause of concern for economists. By 2019, there will be 290 people of pensionable age per 1,000 people of working age, and by 2039 this number will have increased to 370.
The proportion of people who work after they turn 65 has doubled to about 10 per cent since the turn of the millennium, while the share of 50 to 64-year-olds in work has climbed to a record 71 per cent. Still, this increase is not enough to keep pace with helping pay for our ageing population.
As Jeremy May, head of pensions at PricewaterhouseCoopers points out, this societal trend is exacerbating what is known as the “lifetime financial security gap” — the income people want to retire on and provision they receive in retirement.
According to May, from a purely financial perspective the retirement age may need to be raised as high as 75-years-old to meet this shortfall. However while the UK is slowly moving towards increasing the state retirement age to 68, he believes practically and politically it would not be realistic for a government to ask its citizens to work beyond 70.
Professor Karen Glaser, who is a specialist in gerontology at King’s College London and one of the authors of the study, insists the research highlights that recently retired people represent a vital and currently untapped resource of potential labour. Although she warns that as it is the better educated who are more likely to unretire, the phenomenon could exacerbate inequality between pensioners.
Brendan McCambridge,
“There is a labour shortage,” she says. “What our work shows is this willing and able pool of people that really does want to stay working.”
The concept of “unretirement” was given the Hollywood treatment in the 2015 film, The Intern, starring Robert De Niro as a 70-year-old retired executive who after losing his wife applies for a junior position at a New York fashion start-up.
The strapline of the film was ‘Experience Never Gets Old’ and those who have returned to work in real life insist they are welcomed by junior colleagues.
Jim Baker is a 69-year-old chemistry teacher who officially retired in 2008 from Lincoln Christ’s Hospital School where he had been for 38 years.
However he quickly found himself tempted back into work and in 2009 was one of 50 people nationwide recruited by the Government to act as mentors for newly qualified teachers.
Since then the married father-oftwo has continued to work as a teacher, trainer and consultant.
“It’s important to keep the mind active but I also wanted to stay in the classroom to help show people,” he says.
To date, Baker has now amassed 47 years of experience teaching in the classroom and even as he approaches 70 insists he has no intention of crossing his name off the chalkboard.
“I don’t think I will ever retire,” he says. “While I can still do it, I will.”