As if losing your job during the pandemic weren’t stressful enough, the chancellor Jeremy Hunt now adds insult to injury by suggesting that the over 50s should get off the golf course and back into the office to help the UK tackle its labour shortages. Like many politicians, the chancellor is attempting to shift the blame for the economy’s workforce woes on the population who want to, and need to, work to get through the cost-of-living crisis.
But securing a new role when you are aged between 50 and 65 is no easy task, courtesy of the insidious ageism that permeates UK society. Research shows that a person aged 50 or older is more than twice as likely as their younger counterparts to be looking for work two years after being made redundant.
The chancellor is well aware of this statistic, but by apportioning blame on the sandwich generation he hopes to take the spotlight off the impact his party’s austerity policies are having on the economy. He has been rumbled. A report by the pensions consultancy Lane Clark & Peacock (LCP) shows that long-term ill health, and not early retirement, may account for a significant percentage of the UK’s 9 million missing workers. These are people who want to work but can’t because they are waiting for vital NHS treatment.
The report goes on to illustrate the detrimental impact NHS England’s huge waiting lists are having on those who are categorised as ‘short-term sick’; as the longer they are forced to wait to be treated, the more their condition deteriorates, increasing the chances of it developing into a ‘long-term sickness’, and thus making it harder for them to return to work.
The NHS has been underfunded by more than £25 billion since 2010, while around £8bn in vital funding has been stripped from local authorities’ social care budgets. This has resulted in a threadbare health and care system staffed by an exhausted, demoralised and ever dwindling workforce who cannot meet the rising demand for services from people across the age spectrum.
Despite all the evidence, the government continues to ignore the unintended consequences of its disastrous austerity policies. Tin-earned, it is now charging ahead with a punitive sanctioning regime in a misguided effort to increase labour supply even though the evidence to show that sanctions move people into work is patchy, at best. What the evidence does show, however, is that sanctions cause significant harm and make people so ill that they may never be fit to work again.
