to think if the state pension age of 68 is being brought forward.........

[JenniferBooth]

then they need to stop moaning and whining when there are no family members (read women)
to provide unpaid care so elderly relatives can be discharged from hospital
You cant have it both ways.

@Quisquam i bet some of them are on an NHS waiting list.

With 7 million on a waiting list they're blind to be aren't they?

Then long covid.

Honestly this isn't a genuine attempt to help anybody back to work.

It's giving the people who like someone to blame a new target.

Bound to be, sorry.

It's giving the people who like someone to blame a new target

Yes Totally

It's completely unnecessary to make people work longer before they can retire.

If we need workers there is a massive labour market just across the channel.

Just restore freedom of movement and the workers will come.

I think the government thought the India trade deal would be done by now and that has loads of immigration visas for Indian people built into it.

The points based immigration system we have now doesn't let fruit pickers or teaching assistants or hospital porters etc in.

A survey of UK businesses suggests that even though short of staff, they favour younger applicants.

So its a load of bollox what the govt is trying to do, its just someone else to blame as the economy goes south.

On India, all we'd do is import a lot of unskilled workers, who would struggle to integrate, EU citizens are better educated & how many times in the past did we hear about a degree educate East European working in care etc and then 3 months, was managing the care agency.

In the NHS, EU staff are trained to equivalent UK standards, so used to fit straight in.

Often EU staff came here to train and stayed. Not any more. We voted to end that apparently so we can't complain that we don't have enough medics. Or pharmacists, or dentists, or vets.

Just saw this article from yesterday, www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-64441775 . They refer to a Chartered Management Institute (CMI) survey:

"The CMI surveyed more than 1000 managers working in UK businesses and public services. It found that just 4 out of 10 (42%) were open to a large extent to hiring people aged between 50 and 64." The comparable figures were 74% for the 18 to 34 age group, and 64% for the 34 to 49 age group.

There's no point trying to strongarm the economically inactive over 50s back into work unless equal effort is put into increasing demand for them.

Someone just posted in our facebook group for help in finding work as she is struggling due to her age. The first answer was that cleaning and care work is always needed. Nothing wrong with either but if people think their choices are that limited they are less likely to want to go back.
And care work should be seen as a skilled job not the default setting when there is nothing else.

Cleaning and care work are very physical jobs. Doing that when you are mid sixties will not be possible for many people anyway.

Umm, dunno what planet posho you live on, but most pensioners and people in their 40s onwards have no possibility of not needing a state pension!!!!

I don’t know my one who doesn’t rely on the state pension.

Please don’t bung us younger x’ers in with the baby boomers.

I class as an x’er, being only 4 years older than the first millennials. I never had family support and come from a poor background, brought up in hand me downs and having to borrow clothes to get my first job. I did go to uni and didn’t pay fees, but didn’t get much of a grant. My generation were the first to be affected by house prices quadrupling in a very short time 20 years ago, while wages never have even now and I was trapped in private rent for 20 years. I outqualified both my parents when I got GCSEs and I am still working far harder than my mother ever did right now as a mother myself, yet she remains better off than I am.

The issue is housing, and my generation will get screwed again no doubt as todays youngsters seem to think they’re the first to be affected. My generation is going to take the blame for the ageing population, but we’re the ones who have had to sit and watch it while the boomers took the piss.

Frankly, I’d have been better off by now if I’d never bothered to try to do anything and had got myself pregnant as a teen like so many others from my shitty estate. So I am not in the same group as the idle rich landlords I’ve had to fund and they’re equally idle inheriting children. Discriminating by age alone is too simplistic without allowing for inheritance now.

How did we “take the piss’? We did everything expected of us. We paid the market rate for our houses and paid our mortgages for 25 years. We worked from the age of 16 in most cases - just 5% of us went to university. We saved into pension schemes where we could - many jobs made no provision for us to do so. We paid our taxes - we were still paying for a war that ended before we were born until 2006. We paid at least two generations’ pensions from our NI. We have paid for at least two generations’ education. Most of us worked for 50 years, give or take.

In addition we’re the generation of women who fought for maternity leave and pay while not benefiting from it ourselves. And the generation that provided millions of hours of unpaid care for our parents.

What would you have liked us to do differently? Because it feels to me like we did enough, let alone not “taking the piss”.

I do not know about you personally. But your generation was the one that brought back private landlording and forced my generation to be the first in 50 years to work for nothing but paying your mortgages “because it was for your pensions” and we were being so nasty and greedy to complain.

I have had to pay between 4 and 10 times as much as your generation did for a basic house: after having already paid the equivalent of two three houses for members of your generation.

This despite working so much harder than my landlords ever had to.

The constant gaslighting about how we should remain positive throughout because the war generation had it so much harder was a very bitter pill to have to swallow, again and again. Yours was not the war generation, and we were not at war. Our working lives were sacrificed merely to fuel greed. And we still have to work for another 20 years to pay off the inflated mortgage, if we don’t get screwed with a crash, before we can even think of saving for a retirement that will never happen for us.

And spare me the guff about paying for education. Yours was paid for, and so was any training you required, which was a good deal less than now. My education has had to watch the higher wages I worked for being completely devalued at the same time as more and more skills, education and responsibility is required. Educated jobs now pay the same as uneducated and those of us who did what we were told and worked have been completely betrayed.

No, you don’t know about me personally. I’ve only ever owned one property at a time so has everyone else I know. Mine wasn’t the war generation but we were the ones whose taxes repaid the debt, in my case for over 30 years of my working life - the basic rate of income tax was 33% when I started work. And please don’t try to tell me your generation works harder than we did because you’re the one gaslighting if that’s your contention.

ODFOD.

All that education worked then.

Your generation fell into work with few qualifications. My mother would not find work now. My father might: being male there are plenty of low skill jobs for men which pay more than traditional health and education jobs requiring qualifications.

I have heard nothing but excuses and lies from that generation all my life. You are wasting your breath telling me otherwise now, as much as I have to save mine for the next 20 years of dead end jobs in the only dead end part of the country that I can afford to live in, facing the hostility from youngsters that your generation has caused.

So, could you answer my question - what would you have liked us/me to have done differently?

But your generation was the one that brought back private landlording and forced my generation to be the first in 50 years to work for nothing but paying your mortgages “because it was for your pensions” and we were being so nasty and greedy to complain.

Explain how we did that? We never voted for this? Margaret Thatcher wanted council houses sold off? Why? The Tories wanted to break the hold the unions, such as the coal miners could exert over the country by striking? How? Ensure people had mortgages to pay, to make them think twice about striking in future, because they had to pay their mortgage! Break up the national unions, by fragmenting industries like British Rail, education (via academies), the NHS, the coal mines…..How many mines are left now?

We didn’t do anything - the government did! And we didn’t vote for them!

Not you specifically because i know your feelings on the matter.

But it is the so called boomer generation that have given us a Tory govt for most of the post war period and gave us brexit.

Even now, the govt can find a 10% increase for the state pension but only 3 or 4% for nurses.... we all know the Govt don't care a jot about struggling pensioners so they have given this increase and many others like it, to "buy" their votes & ime it works, none of my older relatives have any intention of voting differently.

Older generations didn't dictate house prices and took advantage of cheaper housing (as anyone would) however, they do themselves no favours by shouting at people "we did it, we did, it we did it" unable to recognise the issues younger people have.

But it is the so called boomer generation that have given us a Tory govt for most of the post war period and gave us brexit

Im a late boomer 1964. It’s the early ones you’re talking about. The late ones were more educated and on the whole disliked Thatcher. No one my age group votes Conservative and all voted Remain amongst friends and colleagues. My brother and sister were earlier boomers. But they felt like me.

Maybe stop blaming a generation?