29th August 2026
Britain has a strange relationship with retirement. We spend much of our political time worrying that there will not be enough people of working age to pay for the growing costs of an ageing population, while at the same time treating a particular birthday as though it marks the end of a person's useful economic life.
That approach may have made sense when people generally lived shorter lives and work was often physically demanding from beginning to end. But the world has changed. People are living longer, many remain healthy and capable well beyond 65, and the economy increasingly depends on knowledge, experience and skills rather than simply physical strength.
So perhaps we are asking the wrong question.
Instead of repeatedly asking whether the State Pension age should rise from 67 to 68, and eventually perhaps beyond, should we be asking whether the whole concept of retirement needs to be redesigned?
The Government is already reviewing the State Pension age. The current legislation provides for a rise from 67 to 68, although the Government's most recent review concluded that there should be no immediate change to the legislation and that the next review should consider the options. A third review was launched in 2025.
But increasing the pension age is only one way of dealing with an ageing population. It may also be the least imaginative.
There is an enormous difference between telling someone that they must work full-time until 70 and creating a system in which people can gradually reduce their working hours while continuing to contribute to the economy.
That distinction matters.
A healthy 68-year-old accountant may have many productive years ahead. So might an engineer, solicitor, teacher, business owner, consultant or skilled technician. Their greatest value may not even be the hours they can work themselves. It may be the knowledge they can pass to younger employees.
In a country complaining about skills shortages, that experience should surely be regarded as an economic asset rather than something which automatically disappears when someone reaches pension age.
The figures make the issue difficult to ignore. The Office for National Statistics has reported that increases in economic inactivity following the pandemic were particularly concentrated among people aged 50 to 64. The Government has also published analysis showing that reaching State Pension age has a measurable effect on labour-market participation. In its analysis, moving from age 65 to 66 was associated with a 12.8 percentage-point fall in employment and a similar rise in inactivity.
That does not mean everybody suddenly becomes incapable of working on their 66th birthday. It tells us something rather different: rules and expectations influence behaviour.
If society says that 65 or 67 is the natural end of working life, many people will organise their lives around that expectation. Employers may do the same. Pension arrangements certainly do.
But what if we changed the expectation?
Imagine a system in which retirement became a gradual transition rather than a switch being turned off.
Someone might work five days a week at 60, four days at 65, three days at 68 and perhaps two days at 72. Another person might leave employment altogether at 62 because their health or circumstances require it. Someone else might continue working full-time at 70 because they enjoy it and remain perfectly capable.
There would be no single answer because there is no single type of 70-year-old.
This is particularly important when we talk about fairness.
A physically demanding job in construction, fishing, agriculture, care or some forms of manufacturing cannot simply be compared with sitting at a desk, running a business or working from home. Asking somebody who has spent 40 years doing physically exhausting work to continue until 70 is very different from asking somebody whose job is primarily intellectual to remain economically active for a few more years.
That is why a crude increase in State Pension age could create an unfair system.
But there is another side to this argument. We should also be careful about assuming that every older person wants to stop working.
Some people actually like working. They enjoy the social contact, the sense of purpose and the opportunity to remain involved. Others may not want to work full-time but would happily contribute a couple of days a week.
There is also a financial incentive.
Continuing to earn even a modest income after reaching pension age can make a significant difference to household finances. It can allow people to spend less of their savings, build up additional financial security and perhaps help their children or grandchildren.
For the wider economy, continued employment means more tax revenue and fewer people entirely dependent on pension income.
And there is an even bigger issue that is often overlooked.
Experience is not easily replaced.
A young employee can be highly educated, enthusiastic and technologically capable, but that does not automatically replace 30 or 40 years of practical knowledge. The experienced worker knows which mistakes have already been made, which suppliers can be trusted, how customers behave and what can go wrong when something looks straightforward on paper.
Britain has spent years worrying about productivity. Perhaps one of the simplest ways of improving it is to make better use of the experience already sitting in the population.
That does not mean keeping older workers in jobs that no longer suit them. It means changing the jobs to suit the workers.
Flexible hours could become much more common. Part-time contracts could be designed specifically for older workers. Employers could create mentoring roles. Experienced people could work on short-term projects rather than permanent contracts. Retired professionals could return for a few days a month when their knowledge is needed.
The self-employed already demonstrate that working beyond traditional retirement ages can be perfectly normal. Government research has found that 72% of self-employed people who had not yet retired expected to work beyond 65, compared with 57% of employees.
There is another potential benefit which deserves much more attention: intergenerational knowledge transfer.
Instead of viewing an older worker and a younger worker as competitors for the same job, employers could see them as complementary.
A 70-year-old could teach a 25-year-old the practical side of an industry while the younger employee could help the older worker understand new technology. The result could be a much more productive workforce than simply replacing one generation with another.
That matters enormously in rural Scotland.
In places such as Caithness, the loss of an experienced worker can be particularly significant because the replacement may not be readily available. If a specialist engineer, tradesperson, manager or business owner retires, there may not be another person with the same skills waiting around the corner.
The problem is not simply the number of people available to work. It is whether the right skills are available in the right place.
That is why the debate about retirement should be connected to the debate about Britain's labour shortages.
If employers are struggling to recruit, and if people in their late 60s and early 70s are still healthy and willing to work, there ought to be a mechanism for bringing the two together.
But there must also be a recognition that retirement is about more than economics.
People deserve the opportunity to stop working. Some will have caring responsibilities. Others will have health problems. Some will simply have spent decades working and want to do something different.
The answer therefore cannot be compulsory employment into old age.
Nor should it be a system in which the State Pension age continually rises because governments cannot otherwise balance the books.
Perhaps the better approach is to separate the idea of retirement from the idea of stopping work.
A person could receive their State Pension and continue working. They already can, and the Government explicitly confirms that people can claim State Pension while still working.
But we could go considerably further.
We could make it easier for employers to offer flexible work to older employees. We could encourage phased retirement. We could make part-time employment more attractive. We could encourage businesses to retain experienced workers as mentors and consultants. We could make training available to older workers so that changing technology does not automatically push them out of employment.
Most importantly, we could change the cultural assumption that reaching a particular age means a person has somehow stopped being economically valuable.
There is a danger in the current debate that older people are viewed mainly as a cost.
They are portrayed as people drawing pensions, using healthcare and increasing the dependency ratio.
That is only half the story.
An older person may also be a taxpayer, a homeowner, a consumer, an employer, a volunteer, a carer, a business owner, a mentor or a highly experienced worker.
They may be contributing to society in ways that do not appear neatly in government spreadsheets.
Britain certainly has a demographic problem. The number of people of traditional working age relative to older people is expected to change significantly over coming decades. Government analysis projects the UK's old-age dependency ratio rising from 280 people of pensionable age per 1,000 people of working age in 2020 to 341 by 2045.
But demographic change does not automatically mean that the answer is simply to make everybody work longer.
We should be looking at productivity, immigration, technology, training, childcare, health, housing, flexible employment and the participation of older people as parts of the same problem.
And perhaps we should also ask individuals a slightly different question.
If you reach pension age and you are healthy, financially secure and still enjoy working, why should retirement necessarily mean stopping?
There is nothing wrong with choosing retirement. But there is also nothing wrong with choosing to continue contributing.
Indeed, for some people, continuing to work may be good for their finances, their health, their social life and their sense of purpose.
The real mistake would be to design a system that assumes everybody must make the same choice.
Britain probably does need to rethink retirement. But the answer should not simply be to move the finishing line.
We should instead create a much wider range of options between full-time employment and complete retirement.
The future may not be about working until 68, 70 or 72.
It may be about having the freedom to decide how much we want to work, when we want to work and what we are capable of contributing.
That would be a much more sensible response to an ageing population than simply putting another number on the State Pension age.
After all, if Britain really does not have enough workers to fill the vacancies it has, perhaps it is time we stopped asking only how many years people have left before retirement and started asking a more useful question:
What can people still contribute?