The greying of the UK workforce

By 2020 a third of workers in the UK will be aged over 50 and a new TUC report highlights significant changes in the age profile of the workforce. As reported in yesterday’s Observer, the number of working Britons over 65 has tripled in 15 years with 258,000 women and 338,000 men still working past the state retirement age, compared with 93,000 and 112,000 respectively in 1998. In the same period youth unemployment increased by a corresponding amount and now stands at 973,000. The retirement age in the UK is currently 65 for men and 60 for women. By 2020, it will be raised to 66 for both men and women, and again to 67 by 2028:
http://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/aug/24/over-65s-work

Work till you drop – a cause for celebration?

Tomorrow marks the end of the UK's default retirement age (DRA) and the TUC welcomes the scrapping of what it regards as an ‘unfair anachronism in modern workplaces’ – but in a country with over 2.5m unemployed, the longest working hours in Europe as well as (post-Hutton) pension benefits linked to a rising state pension age –is this really social progress? http://www.tuc.org.uk/workplace/tuc-20099-f0.cfm

Why the night got darker for decent pensions - removing the National Insurance rebate

Yet another nail was hammered into the coffin of final salary linked occupational pensions with the Budget announcement of the withdrawal of the contracting out rebate for defined benefit final salary linked pension schemes.