Like the GO Programme, the aim of the new venture will be to provide a sound evidence base for policy, practice and product development. It will not just identify the new dynamics but also seek ways current influences (biological, clinical, technological, social and behavioural) shaping present lives can be managed to produce the maximum benefits for older people.
At the launch conference of the GO Programme in March, 2001, Walker sounded a much needed optimistic note over lengthening life expectancy. It provided a refreshing counterpoint to a media that was concentrating on the negative consequences - shrinking worker to pensioner ratios and the rise in dependency. He set out to change a debate that was frequently filled "by a demography of despair, which portrays population ageing not as a triumph for civilisation, but something closer to apocalypse." The ambition that was there in 2001 still burns as bright in 2005. If we have not yet created a society celebrating age, it is not as despairing as it once was.
One group of projects in the new Programme will look at 'ageing well across the lifecourse'. This research will include active ageing, independence, later life transmissions, and the oldest old. The second theme will explore the financial and physical environments of ageing and include a look at global dimensions.
Active ageing emerged as a concept from social gerontologists, to which Walker pays tribute. It is now to be found in many policy documents of UK, EU and US policymakers - an example of how research can influence policy. Employment is only one part of such studies, but the Programme will be looking at how work contributes to wellbeing. One of Walker's earliest studies was examining the disproportionate effects on older workers of the decline in Sheffield's steel industry. He went on to conduct the first study of employer attitudes to older people.
There are now one million people working beyond state pension - although many not so much from choice as driven by financial need.
For much of his working life, Walker's studies have been set against a background of proportionately ever declining numbers of older people in the workforce. By the 1990s only one in three men was in work in the year leading up to their state retirement age. The economic cost of so many 50 to 65-year-olds not in work estimated to be as high as £30 billion. The benefits of maintaining an active life were explored by the GO Programme, but will be widened by the new one. Among the more fundamental questions it will explore is the degree to which genetic and behavioural factors interact and influence lifecourses. It coincides with better news on the work front. The proportion of people in work between 50 and their state pension age (60 for women, 65 for men) has risen from 64 per cent in the mid 1990s to 70 per cent in the latest labour market statistics. There are now one million people working beyond state pension (nine per cent of the age group) although many not so much from choice as driven by financial need.
The second theme - which includes financial circumstances - will coincide with the biggest debate about pensions for three decades. In an interim report last October, the Pensions Commission set out the stark facts: as many as 12 million workers are not saving enough for retirement. Inadequate though many existing pensions are, the next generation currently will end up 30 per cent poorer unless they are ready to pay more tax, save more, and work longer. The GO Programme set out the desolate conditions many existing pensioners suffer. The new exercise is bound to follow suit.
Walker has been one of the most prominent advocates of pursuing research that can help policymakers and practitioners. But he is well aware that that policy making is not the linear process that some researchers dream of - that evidence leads to debate which leads to decisions. He wrote succinctly in Understanding Quality of Life in Old Age, in the Growing Older book series, of the unrealistic expectations that both researchers and policymakers hold for each other: "On the one hand research cannot always be delivered to meet unpredictable timetables of policy making or to answer specific questions in a direct way and, on the other, policy is rarely the single event that rational scientists imagine it to be. More commonly it is a myriad of apparently disjointed actions that sometimes coalesce and are labelled in retrospect as decisions. Policy making is rarely a sequential process with clearly defined stages."
Instead, like the GO Programme, the aim will be to permeate the context in which policymakers operate. Stand by for a similar operation with this new venture under which there will be special seminars with key policymakers, constructive links with the wider policy community including NGOs, as well as intelligent dissemination of project findings as they come through. It worked for GO. Its message of new opportunities in later life was high up in Labour's mini-manifesto on older people and still permeates Department for Work and Pensions policies and publications.
The New Dynamics of Ageing Programme could not be better timed. It is no longer just 11 million pensioners plus three million early retirees demanding to be heard. There is another generation - 15 million mainly post-war baby boomers, spanning 20 years and aged between 45 and 65 - marching toward retirement with a high set of demands and who will not be fobbed off. Researchers could not be operating on a more responsive political platform.
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