To think part of the increase in long term sickness is the increase in retirement age?

[Lazykitten]

Thinking of the people I know who are long term economically inactive long term (I believe that counted as over 6 months) and nearly all I know who fall into that bracket are my parents and there friends. Dad was a factory sparky and mum was a cleaner. Dad stopped work at i think around 61, mum does part time caring now in her early 60s but really struggles and I can see her having to give it up soon.

Most of their friends had similar manual jobs and now in their mid 60s a lot are signed off sick waiting for pension. These are people who have had manual jobs since they were 15/16 and their bodies are knackered. They can't (and very little point) in retraining now for their last couple of years before they get the state pension.

I work in an office job so can feasibly see how I could work to my late 60s and beyond, but those who've done manual work for over 40 years have the wear and tear on their bodies that they simply can't. As well as other health problems & decreasing energy levels that come with ageing.

There's got to be a sizeable number of folk age 60-67 that fall in that bracket? And taking it further is it another stick to beat the working class with?

Your maths is off. I already said my state retirement is 67. That means 51 years of work.
My parents who retired at 60 and 65 started full time work at 15, not 16.

You can always apply for uni now? There's not an age limit. Bonus, you won't have to repay it for 30 years.

I’m early 40’s my parents would be in their 70’s now and like most of that generation, women got to retire at 60. I don’t know how old you are but your parents are the exact generation I’m talking about, not you if you’ll be 67 when you retire. Their generation or era had it the best.

Sorry, I really can’t let this one go. I would have loved to have gone to university - my life would have been quite different if I’d had that privilege, but there was no chance. Firstly I was a female and thus not worthy of higher education on the grounds that girls get married and have babies! Secondly in the 60s most people left school at 16 and were straight out to work. Boys at least had the chance of apprenticeships but for girls it was office/shop/ hairdressing/ factory until they found someone to marry. And in those days there were far fewer universities and you had to be really clever to get a place as all degree courses were very academic. In fact none of my girl school friends went to uni - a few went to teachers training colleges - teaching was a permissible career for girls as it fitted in with school hours! A few of the boys I knew went to uni but it certainly wasn’t a route open to working class kids - most parents were only to eager for their kids to start work so that they could contribute to the household budget for a few years until they married. That was the norm in those days - I certainly wasn’t given any choice about working at all and I’m still working at 73! Whatever anyone says being a child in the 50s and a teenager in the 60s was shit and even more so if you were female. I’d give anything to have the chances of those born in the 70s like my children - that’s really the cohort who’ve had it all!

Give over saying girls didn't get the chance to be educated. They did. My mother came from nothing (pit village in Barnsley) and got herself to Durham in 1961. She wasn't rich she was clever. You could do it. Whether you got educated or not was largely down to family attitudes

I’ve been signed off work from being 18. The condition I have the medication stopped being produced. There is an alternative but it never worked. I’m literally stuck until someone creates a new medication and it gets approved via NHS.
There will be a lot of people who had this medication in the same boat as me! But MPs didn’t care when it was brought up. :)

University was free but it was certainly not the norm. In fact it was beyond the imagination of the the vast majority of school leavers.

In the UK, the number of students who graduated from a university increased considerably between
1950 - 3%
1970 - 8%
1990 - 19%
By 2019 over 50% of young people were going to university.

Until the 1970 a working class girl would leave school with pretty much zero chance of going to university and enter a workforce where equal pay or equality of any sort did not exist.

I'm not denying that life is very hard for young people now. I really wish it were different and we should be steaming mad that things are as they are, but no generation has had it easy - particularly women.

It was an option though, regardless of whether people went for it or not. I’m not saying it would have been the done thing or easy but if someone had the brains then it was an option. There were more grammar schools back then and that was supposed to help social mobility. Thatcher was a greengrocer daughter after all. Even if it wasn’t an option at 16/17, the fees didn’t start until the late 90’s so there was the opportunity to go as a mature student, for free still.

It’s not just about free university, it’s everything else that that age group benefited from. The low cost and much more abundant housing for a start.

I agree it wouldn’t have been the done thing or the norm especially for working class girls. I also agree that women didn’t have it great back then, but overall that generation benefited in other ways that this younger generation will really struggle with.

In most working class families, mine included, the attitude was that if anyone was going to be educated then it would be a boy because he would have to work all his life and support a family. I was plainly told that education would be wasted on me despite the fact that I was the one who passed her 11 plus and went to Grammar school! It’s great that your mother had her chance to shine, but believe me she was a rarity at that time. And sadly there was very little you could do to change familial attitudes when you were a 16 shouting into the wind about the fucking awful unfairness of it all!

And someone claiming PIP before state pension age with mobility component continues to get that mobility component usually for the rest of their lives with very light touch reviews .Someone who has a major stroke a day after turning state pension age can't even claim a disability benefit for 6 months and then can only claim Attendance allowance which has no mobility component at all. Massively unfair to the person getting sick just after pension age who gets potentially half the disability payment that someone having a major stroke a few months before pension age does.. I see it frequently in my job role, people still young ( late sixties) having life changing mobility issues sometimes paralyzed totally dependent on others and the maximum they can get in disability benefit is just over £100 a week. If you happen to have a younger partner who has to give up work to care for you, then you are doubly shafted being only able to claim UC to live off too with potentially years to go until you both get your state pension and are better off.

Five a half years ago some were all for it!

https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/money-matters/3479693-Changes-to-Pension-Credit

It was unfair on the old system that purely by having an older partner the younger could give up work and they could jointly claim pension credit and the person under state pension age had no expectations to work but with UC I think the problem is that once the older persons state pension is taken off in full , people actually get very little in UC even with disability and carers elements added.
It's the lack of mobility component of Attendance Allowance that is particularly unfair in my opinion. You have a portion of elderly people who are still on the old DLA and never switched to PIP who often have higher rate mobility component of DLA because whatever anyone says it was certainly easier to get than PIP, then you have the ones on PIP turning state pension age on both components and that just continues, then you have people claiming a disability payment for the first time after state pension age and they can't get anything for mobility despite the vast majority of the problems being strokes, dementia, Osteoarthiritis of joints and having to wait years for joint replacements. It just seems very unfair.

But going by the same principle why should the older partner get UC because they have a younger partner.

Because it's a joint claim, means tested and the government says a couple needs a certain amount to live off which unless someone has a very good state pension is often not enough. If you have a younger partner who can work then it's usually fine and you won't qualify for UC anyway unless you have a high rent maybe, but the couples where one has had to give up work to be a carer do not get a lot.

Exactly this. I left school in the late 1980s, and out of 200 pupils leaving (the year I left,) around 30 went to university. Most others were just shoved into factories, foundries, supermarkets, shops, care work, and other general unskilled low-paid labour.

As soon as I left school - within a week, my mum got one of my aunts to get me a job at the factory she worked at. I was made redundant after 2 years. Within a week (again,) my parents neighbour had got me a job in her factory. No way was I sitting at home doing nothing, and contributing nothing. My folks wanted me bringing in money. They even had my redundancy money from the first job to help them financially.

When the second job made me redundant 2.5 years later, I took the redundancy money before my folks could get it, and moved away to a big city from the small-minded little town I lived in. Retrained in office work/I.T/secretarial etc, and never looked back. Never moved back home, and never worked in a factory again. Currently work in the public service sector. Have done for some years. I had to work very hard to get out of factory work. That was the only thing working class girls were allowed to do then! The pay wasn't very good either. And it was bloody hard work!

I did go and see my parents once or twice a month, and my relationship with them was OK, (they died in the noughties,) but I never moved back to their home, or that town. Didn't settle too far away in the end, but never went back.

Yes, so you could move from one factory job to another very easily. It's not like that now.

the younger partner in an age gap couple where they were on pension credit was already a carer in a lot of cases and the changes will have meant the younger partner will have gone back to work. Achieved what it set out to do Great Hopefully though in a lot of cases the younger partner will have demanded more from social care refusing to do both. I know i would!!

Well it kind of is. I know of many people who have been made redundant from a factory in the past year or two, and they have walked straight into another factory job within a week or two. There are many factory jobs in some towns and cities.

Also, as I said, I was made redundant from my 2 factory jobs in the mid to late 1980s. Redundancy, and job loss was very common then! As much as it is now. (If not a bit more.)

It was never an option and I speak
as someone who did indeed go to grammar school. Once I’d started work there as never any chance to return to education because as with most people I had to keep working so that failure though I was I could make sure that at least my children could have the advantages that I missed out on!

The point is that you didn’t need a university education back then to get on the housing ladder etc… normal basic low paid jobs enabled this. That doesn’t happen now.

A family member bought their first house at 18/19. 2 bed terrace, no deposit and working in the bakers. That’s the stuff of dreams in this day and age.

@Fluffywigg Thatcher's father was Mayor. The family was "trade" so looked down on by the aristocracy. But her background was several steps up the ladder from mine.
Watch Billy Elliott to get an idea of what life was like for many working class kids back then. University was not a choice. Many kids were brought up with the idea you left school at 16 and worked. Many families did not even know grants were available. You have no idea how little lots of people knew about university back then.

And there were no grammar schools where I lived. We all went to the local comprehensive that was full of kids from very poor families. Loads of kids got fsm in my school, including me. Some of the teachers to their shame thought school was a waste of time for us once we could read and write. Girls were encouraged to be secretaries, childcare workers, or if bright nurses. Boys were encouraged to go into the trades.
I really get annoyed at people who talk about our opportunities with zero idea of what life was like back then.

Kindly you have no idea what you are talking about. Youth unemployment was sky high.

Is no one addressing the damage from experimental and rushed in Vaccines