In Focus: The swinging sixties
Iain Duncan-Smith spoke recently about tomorrow’s pensioners: “They will, on average, be working for a lot longer, they will be retired for longer, they won't on the whole have final salary guaranteed pensions in the way that perhaps their parents did.”
It’s easy to form some kind of knee-jerk opinion about the phasing out of the default retirement age. Waking up in the middle of January to go to work in the freezing cold is bad enough when you’re 37 – do I really want to be doing that when I’m 67?
However, new research from Creditsafe has found that concerns over the raising of the retirement age may be unfounded given the number of senior business positions currently held by those aged over 65. Creditsafe says there are already 360,000 directors in the UK over the age of 65, equating to 3 per cent of the pensionable population.
Yesterday saw the beginning of the end for default retirement age, meaning it can no longer be used to force workers to retire at 65. It is set to be abolished altogether in October 2011. Creditsafe’s analysis shows that pensionable directors are already demonstrating that they have much to offer UK PLC and the business community as over 100,000 companies (4 per cent) currently employ directors over the standard retirement age.
The research says that pensionable directors are also a desirable asset for new companies as 10,000 directors over 65 have been appointed to newly incorporated businesses in the last six months (3.5 per cent of all new companies). Indeed, we are witnessing a new generation of entrepreneurial pensioners, which Creditsafe has dubbed the ‘Silverpreneurs’. Tacky, perhaps, but it’s hard to dispute the figures
Of course not everyone want to work into their seventies – certainly those who have spent their life involved in some form of manual labour, and who are ready for a few years rest. But there does seem to be evidence that people at the top of businesses have no problem coping with delayed retirement.
The average age of the top 20 billionaires for 2011 is 67.4, over two years above the state retirement ages for the UK and five that of France. No-one’s promising that you’ll be a billionaire by the time you’re 67, of course (although it’d be nice), but with the final salary pensions surely set to become a thing of the past over time, maybe struggling to get up on those frosty mornings might not seem so bad after all.
Comments? Sam Metcalf, Insider
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