It was dubbed the ‘great retirement’, but new analysis shows that half the older people who dropped out of the workforce at the start of the pandemic found themselves struggling financially. The Mail has more.
New analysis has found that 48% of the 50- to 70-year-olds who left employment in 2020-21 ended up in relative poverty.
The Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) think-tank said the figure is “significantly higher” than the proportion who quit before the pandemic, suggesting they were forced into early retirement by lockdown and health risks.
It will put extra pressure on Chancellor Jeremy Hunt to succeed in his attempts to get large numbers of over-50s back to work by offering them so-called midlife MOTs and apprenticeships for new careers.
A massive 3.5 million 50 to 64-year-olds were out of work and not looking for new jobs between November last year and this January, official figures show, a rise of 280,000 on the same period three years earlier before Covid arrived in the the U.K.
Xiaowei Xu, a senior research economist at the IFS, said: “It is often assumed that older people who left the workforce during the pandemic were wealthy individuals retiring in comfort.
“Our analysis shows that those who left in the first year of the pandemic experienced a sharp rise in poverty, despite overall poverty rates falling that year, and also suffered large falls in well-being.
“Some of this group might well be amenable to coming back into the workforce with the right opportunities, and there are signs that some are returning already.”
Turns out you can’t live in lockdown forever.
Worth reading in full.
To join in with the discussion please make a donation to The Daily Sceptic.
Profanity and abuse will be removed and may lead to a permanent ban.