The UK should adopt a three-day working week for the over 50s, former pensions minister Baroness Altmann has said.
Altmann told The Telegraph that by normalising a shorter working week for over 50s, a key demographic in the government’s plans to tackle rising economic inactivity, the UK might see higher employment rates among older people.
She highlighted the success of Swedish-style practices where people are encouraged to work part-time instead of retiring early.
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There should also be more flexible working options for older people, such as job shares.
Altmann said: “The idea that you suddenly stop working at a particular date just because you’re a particular age is not the way to run people’s lives in most cases in the 21st century. It’s not good for your health and it’s certainly not good for your wealth.
“There should be this phase of life – pretirement, I call it – which you all aim to achieve: ‘I’ve reached the point where I’m going to start cutting down.’ That means you don’t have to have a full-time, high- energy, high-roller job. We need a lot of people in this country to do work that isn’t at the top of the tree, but does require a lot of skills and patience.”
A record number of over 50s, 3.6 million people, are now working part-time.
Baroness Altmann said employers should be given tax breaks for hiring older workers, through scrapping or tapering their national insurance contributions, for example. She said this would “help employers see how valuable older people can be”.
Tax incentives are available for workers when they reach the age of 66, but not for the organisations employing them.
“Is that the right way round? If we want to encourage employers to keep employing more people as they get older, maybe they should have the tax break,” she told the Telegraph.
She called for the establishment of more employment agencies that help over 50s secure work.
Altmann, a pensions campaigner whose work has contributed to the formation of the Pension Protection Fund that helps protect workers’ retirement savings when defined benefit pension schemes fail, said workers should be discouraged from withdrawing from their pensions at the age of 55.
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“The whole point is you should have money in your 80s and 90s, not spend it all in your 50s and 60s. There are incentives in the system, but the industry and the pension products are not working to encourage people to not take their pension,” she said.
