The 100-Year Life: Planning For A Better, Longer Future

I joked at my fiftieth that it was great to finally get to the halfway point in my life. I wasn’t that confident or enthused about the prospect at the time as I was really starting to see just how tough old age is first-hand with my parents and their generation struggling to deal with a growing list of ailments. Just recently, when I told my older family members that I was taking a break from work, the general response was: “Enjoy your retirement, you wont regret it, I was busier than ever when I retired”. They struggled to understand the concept of a career-break (other than enforced redundancy) and then regaled me with tales of early retirement packages that saw them all finish working before the age of 60.

For Christmas, my wife bought me and my 22yrd old daughter, who has just embarked on her working life, a joint present at Xmas: The 100-Year Life (100yearlife.com) It speaks to where I am today and to her as she looks at the prospect of a possible 60-year working-life ahead of her.

My life expectancy at birth was ~71 and hers, just ~30yrs later is ~77. At birth, people of her generation had a 50% likelihood of making it to 100. But having got this far relatively unscathed, I am growing increasingly confident of getting that telegram from King Charles (who will be celebrating his 120^th birthday the same week).

Although the UK has a profound inequality in terms of mortality and morbidity which we urgently need to address, the shape of the UK population, and its workforce, is going to change dramatically. Over the last 50 years, UK life expectancy has risen by just over a 1-year in every five-year period. That trend will continue in the developed economies, although it may slow-down as we push our organs to the limit of the potential lifespan. But there are plenty of places around the world where longevity trends will continue to extend for some time to come and plenty of people in the UK expected to die younger than their neighbours on account of the social and economic disadvantages they were born into.

World Population Review shows the UK has one person being born every 41 seconds and one person dying every 49 seconds, plus one net migrant added every 3 minutes. Despite what the right-wing media try to say the story of UK economic change isn’t about sharing a fixed cake with more people from overseas. Immigrants make the cake bigger and take less of it too. The real story is a positive one of us creating a country in which more people can live longer and, if we get this right, healthier lives, where more of them help make the cake bigger for longer too.

According to the UN (as modelled here), the UK’s population is expected to rise to 74 million by 2050 – a net increase of 6m on today and 60% of that growth will be in the 75yr – 90yr age band ie outside our current definition of the working age population.

None of this is a surprise, but its worth remembering that 2050 isn’t that far off. It’s the same time between now OJ Simpson, Rwanda, Park Life and Definitely Maybe. The central theme of the 100-year life is that as individuals we all need to prepare ourselves to move away from a three-stage life (learn, work then retire) to a more flexible four or five stage life (which involves periods of re-creation). Our working lives will be longer, partly out of financial necessity but also because we will be healthier and many of us will want the stimulation it brings. The book shows how a longer working life can help us maintain our vitality assets, productive assets and transformational assets, as well as our tangible assets (wealth).

The concept of work will evolve to be more fluid: the distinction between work and other activities will erode. And the ways in which we work, when we work and where we work will change. Our career paths won’t follow linear courses and the skills we have today may not be in demand tomorrow. The latter parts of the traditional career have been about maximising savings before retirement, whereas the final stage of our future careers could be more about doing stimulating things which pay the bills and allow us to delay drawing on our savings/assets.

No-one ever died saying they wished they’d spent more time at the office, but equally no-one died saying they wished they’d had more chance to see more Homes Under The Hammer.

This story isn’t just about more people being old for longer. It’s also about everyone being younger for longer. That means changes for the traditional career path for younger people who may start work later in life and be keener to take more frequent career breaks to care for others and to refocus their skills offer.

The good news is that if we are ready to face the future, small adjustments now can help us prepare for the long-term. This definitely means increasing our lifetime savings rate; 75% of the pension pots accessed for the first time in Q1 2021 were worth less than £30k and the average size of the UK pension savings pot is estimated to be ~£62k. That wont be enough to get us through and these stark realities are what will really drive behaviour change among people in their 50-70s.

This all has some profound implications for government, but also for businesses and the economic development world, that I have set out here.

For businesses, they will have to:

1. Get serious about learning as a core part of retention: businesses that don’t push staff to replenish their skills and invest in their on-going personal development will be less able to drive change and more vulnerable to staff departure.
2. Think differently about rewards: people’s value will need to be recognised not just through pay, but increasingly also through contribution to savings/pension, ownership of assets they help create (esp intellectual ones and the entity they work in) and investment in their development/wellbeing and learning.
3. Recruit more creatively: it is currently too hard for people over 50 to get the jobs they are qualified for and gaps on a CV should increasingly be seen as a healthy marker of agility, rather than a cause for concern.
4. Shake-up the traditional hierarchy:  successful businesses will increasingly have very experienced people in lower-paid roles overseen by younger managers who were once their juniors.
5. Create flexible patterns of employment: the five-day week and 9 to 5 won’t attract the most creative people who can make the smartest contributions to your businesses and they won’t always want to be in the office to make their contribution.
6. Establish more fluid organisations: people will increasingly be ready to blend traditional employment (with the security that offers) with looser working arrangements (contracting, zero hours arrangements and collaborative partnerships). This will change the way companies operate and how they define themselves. The question: “Who is in charge?” may become more difficult to answer which also opens-up new challenges around governance and authority to make decisions.

For economic development, the implications include:

1. Lifelong Learning: businesses and residents will need much more access to transitional learning and training in order to adapt through the different phases of their longer working lives. That training may be delivered virtually, but the decisions about what re-skilling to offer and who pays for it, will be made locally.
2. Talent Re Entry: how can places make it easier to team up local businesses to harness their talents of under-utilised retirees who have had enough of Homes Under The Hammer?
3. Business & Enterprise Support – business leaders will need help to implement new management practices to succeed in this changing world. And, more young people will need the basics of business planning, financial management, marketing and negotiation skills before they can navigate through the world of work.
4. Places of Learning: traditional campuses will have an opportunity to evolve and build on the university to more lifelong learning opportunities, but the competition from virtual remote suppliers could be fierce.
5. Ownership Models: new models of shared-ownership will be needed to reflect the value of tangible (businesses, property) and intangible (ideas, relationships) assets which growth and development of more flexible models. There will need to be new fairer taxation of assets too.
6. Basic Income: pensioners already benefit from a form of basic income in the state pension, which will need to adapt to the changing demographics and may lead to pressure for a form of basic income at other stages of our lives 9particualr those transition points as people retrain for the next phase of their life).
7. Commercial Property: how much traditional large floorplate, single occupancy business premises will be needed in out towns and cities as the long-term trend towards more fluid and flexible working becomes more established?
8. Housing: as the number of older people, live longer we may see a rise in under-used family housing and may need to look at measures to ensure housing is more efficiently allocated to younger families. This first means looking at making sure we are building enough age-appropriate housing for our older population.

There are further implications for national government to address too; the central one which has to be at the core of the UK’s approach is to secure more equitable outcomes, or actually more equitable starts. The UK has to ensure more people fulfil their life expectancy and we get away from the disgrace of 10+ years of life expectancy gap between communities. This will take time and needs require strong early years action and a re-focused schooling system which equips young adults with the know-how and resilience they will need to navigate through a 100-year life with confidence and optimism.