I really admire Ros Altmann, she is strident, outspoken and – more often than not – right.
Her recent appointment as Business Champion for Older Workers should be welcomed. It is a role for which she is perfectly qualified and I expect her to excel at getting the best deal for older workers, just as she has excelled at just about everything else in her career.
And older workers are undeniably a section of society that needs some help and guidance, but – and here’s my issue – that hardly singles them out as a special case. To be honest, I can’t think of a section of society that doesn’t need some help.
However brilliant Ms Altmann will undoubtedly be in her new role, the appointment seems symptomatic of muddled priorities when it comes to work, savings and pensions.
It seems fairly obvious that younger people are more in need of help. At the risk of sounding like one of those dullards who crawls out of the woodwork every time International Women’s Day comes round to ask “when is International Men’s Day?” (it’s 19 November, incidentally) why isn’t there a Business Champion for Younger Workers? Shouldn’t that be the priority?
The Institute of Fiscal Studies’ (IFS) recent report, Living Standards, Poverty & Inequality in the UK, drummed home the problem, underlining quite how in need of help the young are. Those in their 20s are subject to higher unemployment than any other sector of society, as well as suffering bigger reductions in salary than any other demographic since the latest downturn first hit in 2007. The proportion of young people who own homes has more than halved. Worse, the cost of the downturn is almost exclusively being borne by the young to the extent that pensioners now enjoy an average income 5 per cent higher than working households.
It is a generalisation, but I can’t help feeling previous generations would have been angrier about this. Instead, youth unemployment has become accepted as a fact by those afflicted; they are either resigned to the bleakness of their situation or oblivious to it. Either way, apart from a few lone voices trying to stir the younger generation into caring about this stuff, nobody seems that bothered.
And I find it hard to blame the young for their apathy. It is often said that young people are more likely to vote in the X Factor than a general election. That is a sad state of affairs. But surely, rather than slate the young, we would be better served questioning why politicians are not doing as much as Simon Cowell to be relevant to, and engage with, the younger market.
However important the machinations of Westminster are to young people, I can understand why they don’t feel important. The same is true of pensions.
A former colleague of mine once rightly argued that the media is as much to blame. Every time we illustrate a story about pensions, we use a picture of an old person, as if we too believe that this stuff isn’t relevant to younger people.
We are all part of the same problem. Industry, media and the individuals, there does not even seem to be a cognitive dissonance in knowing that we should be worried. Most of today’s school and university leavers are oblivious to the problems that lie in store for them.
A day or two after the IFS report, some research from Liberty Sipp arrived in my inbox saying that, in order to retire on half the average working salary, people need to start saving 30 years before they’re born. That’s at least 50 years before they will start. I’m probably being generous with that estimate – once student debts are cleared they might be 60 or 70 years late in starting their pension saving.
Automatic enrolment will no doubt provide a sticking plaster, but will never top up savings to make up for 50 years of not doing anything. I’d like to imagine a world where parents start pensions for their unborn kids in the way cricket enthusiasts used to put unborn children on the waiting list for MCC membership, but even then, who would have the foresight to start a pension for a child 30 years before they were born?
I had a son last year. Thirty years before that, in 1983, I was seven. Even if I had decided to forego buying Manic Miner or the latest Musical Youth single to invest in a pension for an unborn child, my pocket money probably would not have gone very far.
It is preposterous to expect children to start saving for their own unborn children, but the alternative solution of adults saving for their unborn grandchildren is even more of a stretch.
Since the baby boomers (those pensioners currently enjoying 5 per cent higher income than workers) each generation has been gradually worse off. This downward trend will continue unless it is arrested now.
It is true that young people are less likely to engage and less likely to vote. And politicians are undoubtedly better served pandering to those who will re-elect them.
Just for once though, I’d like to see them do something that benefits the whole of society. That way the whole of society might be more inclined to provide the votes they crave.