It’s time we encouraged more on-the-job training

IN the United Kingdom, the traditional age when people could receive their old age pension was 65 for men, and 60 for women. As laws were passed in the 1970s such as the Equal Pay Act and the Sex Discrimination Act, there was a feeling that retirement ages should be equalised.

Indeed in 1976 I remember a friend in 1976 signing a petition calling for the retirement age for men to be reduced to 60.

What many thought unfair was that women could retire earlier despite the fact that on average they lived longer. Indeed in 1974 (England and Wales) there was a gap of 6.2 years, with men’s life expectancy at 69.3 years compared with 75.5 years for females.

Sadly, this campaign came to nothing. In fact, though there was talk of a flexible decade of retirement and a common retirement age of 64, in the end what happened was that the women’s retirement age was upped to 65.

This caused consternation amongst some females who felt they’d not been fully informed of the change, and thus hadn’t made the necessary lifestyle adjustments.

Currently the retirement age is 66, and shortly to rise to 67 with further increases in the pipeline.

The reason for this is that we are supposedly living longer, and there are fewer in the workforce to support a growing total of retirees.

Now I’m not entirely convinced by this, as pre-Covid we used to talk of a record number in employment. But there is another factor that is conveniently forgotten, namely the sheer increase in the level of students in further and higher education. Back in 1950 just 14 per cent of youngsters were still studying at the age of 16, and 7 per cent at 17. Sixty years later the figures were 88 per cent and 76 per cent respectively. In 1950 only 3.4 per cent went on to Higher Education, whereas in 2020 37 per cent of eighteen-year-olds were full time undergraduates.

Partly this change was to open up learning to more people, though it also helped to reduce the teenage jobless total as so many were moved from the labour market.

But given that students don’t get free education these days, perhaps it is time to encourage more on-the-job training such as apprenticeships. Then we’d have a larger workforce and could let our older workers retire sooner.