Longevity Experts Set Out Bold Solutions To Maximise The Opportunity Of Longer Lives

Financial incentives for exercising, a leg up to adulthood with a ‘decent start’ lump sum payment for school leavers and allowing bereaved or separated individuals who let out bedrooms, to retain the single-person council tax discount are among the bold ideas set out in One hundred not out: A route map for long lives, published today (Thursday 7 Dec) by the International Longevity Centre UK (ILC).

The route map on the impact of longevity on society, highlights how society and Government need to rethink and invest more in public policies to ensure a more equitable and healthier lifetime.

While the Government has set a target of five years of extra healthy life expectancy for everyone by 2035, according to the Health Foundation achieving this through current policies will take 192 years.

The ILC’s report argues that we cannot continue like this. With significant inequalities within and between generations, a failing care system, struggling health services and increasing numbers dropping out of the workforce early due to ill health, bolder action is urgently needed if we are to achieve longer-term gains from longer lifetimes, both for us as individuals and for us as a society.

Instead of building policies around outdated stereotypes about what we can and should do at each stage of our lives, ILC proposes establishing a new Parliamentary Demographic Change Select Committee, to audit how well government is doing in responding to longer lives.

The ILC’s route map for long lives, published alongside its Future of Ageing conference, sets out wide-ranging ideas for improving health, tackling poverty, building community infrastructure and helping people build relationships and have fun throughout their lives.

These include:

• Ensuring that at least 6% of health spending goes towards preventative activity while embracing the ‘nanny state’ with new measures to curb unhealthy behaviour
• Developing Occupational Health Hubs alongside JobCentre Plus
• Opening an innovation fund – the Healthy Ageing Challenge 2.0 – with a focus on developing and scaling new ideas to improve health, adapt workplaces and tackle isolation and loneliness.
• Requiring 24-hour access to public amenities including toilets and seating areas to reinvigorate the nighttime economy by attracting older consumers
• Creating a new Duke of Edinburgh Award offering fun, fitness, skills development alongside social action for people of all ages
• Harnessing inertia (drawing on the lessons from auto-enrolment in pensions) with a new scheme to encourage workplace savings; an escalator on auto-enrolment minimum contributions and new ways for self-employed people to save
• Developing new multigenerational community hubs building on the best of Sure Start Centres, community hubs and neighbourhood networks.

ILC argues that these changes already attract significant consensus and are the obvious “next steps” for the next Government.

The report also proposes some “bold ideas” for more ambitious changes more commensurate with the scale of the longevity opportunity:

These include:

• Setting up citizens’ panels with the power to make proposals directly to Parliament.
• Giving everyone a leg up to adulthood with a ‘decent start’ lump sum payment to all individuals when they leave high school.
• Developing a new ‘Lifetime Work Standard’, guaranteeing flexible working arrangements, support for carers, and access to training and occupational health.
• Providing financial incentives for physical activity
• Offering a £100 grant to all citizens to be spent on cultural activities
• Letting owner-occupiers who let out rooms in their home, following a bereavement or separation, retain the single-person council tax discount for up to five years

David Sinclair, ILC’s Chief Executive said:

“Over a decade ago, a House of Lords cross-party committee warned that we weren’t ready for our ageing future.  We still aren’t. Today we also need to consider the growing challenges around long-term environmental sustainability and the implications of technological changes alongside the way we approach human longevity.

“The opportunities for long lives are enormous, but politicians have not been honest enough about the trade-offs we’ll have to make now to reap the rewards of long lives in the decades to come.

“We need an honest debate about how we want to carve up our long lives to deliver the things we want and need – to work, to contribute, to learn, to love, to have fun and to care and be cared for.  Getting the balance right will mean doing things differently. We need high-level, cross-governmental work on demographic change. We need to recognise that we might need the state to intervene more in some areas, but we’re also going to have to ask individuals to take more opportunity and even risk in others.

“To realise the opportunity of long lives we can’t procrastinate any more. Our new route map highlights a set of ideas that, frankly, we’ve already been talking about for years. Policymakers now need to grab these and get on with it.

“But, if we want to live up to the seismic shift that we’re already undergoing as a population and reframe the way we live to better suit long lives, then we’re probably going to need to be bolder. We think the time is right to discuss some bigger ideas -whether that’s a “decent start” grant for school leavers, financial incentives for physical activity, or a new guarantee for decent work.

“Only by taking big decisions can we capitalise on the longevity dividend ahead.”