Category: General News

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  • Britain’s Ageing Workforce: What Happens When One in Three Employees Is Over Fifty

    Britain’s Ageing Workforce: What Happens When One in Three Employees Is Over Fifty

    There is a number that British employers have been quietly trying not to look at. According to the Office for National Statistics, roughly one in three people currently in employment in the UK is aged fifty or over. That proportion has been climbing steadily for fifteen years, and by 2030 it will be closer to two in five. The ageing workforce UK 2026 employers are managing is not some future projection; it is the workforce they already have. And most of them are entirely unprepared for it.

    Older professional at a workplace desk, illustrating the ageing workforce UK 2026 challenge for employers
    Photo by World Sikh Organization of Canada on Pexels

    Why employers are only now paying attention

    For a long time, the conversation about older workers was conducted mostly in think-tanks and policy documents. Employers got on with things. Mandatory retirement ages were abolished in 2011, yet many workplaces quietly retained the same assumptions about who should be in which role and for how long. The pandemic changed the calculation sharply. The so-called “great unretirement” that followed, hundreds of thousands of over-50s who had left the labour market between 2020 and 2022 eventually returning, revealed how much productive capacity had been squandered simply through neglect. The DWP put explicit effort behind this: its 2023 midlife review pilot and subsequent 50 PLUS: Choices guidance signalled that government was no longer content to watch the inactivity figures climb.

    The DWP’s position has shifted further in 2026. Universal Credit conditionality rules have been extended to some groups previously considered economically inactive, and there is fresh pressure on Jobcentre Plus to offer credible retraining pathways rather than just administrative hurdles. Whether those pathways exist in any meaningful volume is a separate, and rather thornier, question.

    The pension pressure that changes everything

    Pension policy sits at the heart of all this. The state pension age is rising to 67 by 2028, with a review already under way that may push it to 68 ahead of the previously announced 2044 timetable. For many workers, especially those in physically demanding trades, that is not a policy adjustment; it is a serious welfare question. A 64-year-old scaffolder or care worker cannot simply be told to keep going for three more years without some rethinking of what that job looks like.

    Private pension provision makes the picture more complicated still. Auto-enrolment, introduced in 2012, has been transformational for younger workers, but the cohort currently approaching sixty did much of their working life before it existed. The Resolution Foundation has estimated that roughly a third of people aged 55 to 64 have less than £10,000 in private pension savings. These are not people who can afford early exit. They need to work, and they need employers who understand that.

    What retraining for older workers actually looks like

    The skills question is where good intentions most reliably collapse. Government-funded retraining tends to default towards qualifications suited to younger learners: Level 2 and 3 vocational courses, apprenticeships with age barriers baked into their funding structures, digital skills boot camps that assume basic digital fluency most fifty-somethings from non-office backgrounds simply do not have. I’ve spent time looking at what is actually available through local further education colleges for a hypothetical 57-year-old former retail manager who lost her job to redundancy. The honest answer is: not much that is genuinely transformative.

    There are green shoots. Some larger employers, including BT Group and Aviva, have introduced internal mid-career review schemes specifically targeting employees in their fifties. These include structured conversations about health, workload, flexible working preferences and future development rather than the vague annual appraisal that asks everyone the same questions regardless of their stage of career. That is the right instinct. The problem is that it is confined to large, well-resourced organisations, and the ageing workforce UK 2026 problem is especially acute in small and medium-sized businesses where HR infrastructure is thinner.

    Workplace design and the physical reality of ageing

    There is a design dimension to all of this that gets almost no coverage. Workplaces were built, literally and figuratively, around a younger workforce. Open-plan offices with poor acoustics are genuinely difficult environments for people with age-related hearing changes. Shift patterns that disrupt sleep cycles hit older workers harder, given what we know about how circadian rhythms shift after fifty. Manual handling requirements that sit within legal tolerances for younger backs may cause cumulative harm over years. None of this is exotic or unreasonable to address; it requires willingness to treat workers as individuals with specific physical contexts rather than interchangeable units.

    The Health and Safety Executive has guidance on age-related risk assessment, but enforcement is another matter. I’d argue the more powerful lever is commercial self-interest: experienced workers who feel physically supported are dramatically less likely to leave, and recruitment costs for experienced roles in sectors like healthcare, financial services and skilled manufacturing are substantial. Losing a 54-year-old nurse manager to avoidable burnout and then spending £18,000 recruiting and onboarding a replacement is a poor trade by any calculation.

    The economic case no one should still be arguing

    Britain cannot afford to write off its over-50s. The OBR’s long-run fiscal projections consistently flag age-related spending increases, and the assumption embedded in those projections is that labour force participation among older workers will hold. If it falls, through ill-health, discouragement, or employer indifference, the fiscal consequences ripple across everything from NHS demand to state pension sustainability.

    The emigration of skilled workers to other countries compounds the problem neatly. When experienced professionals leave, the institutional knowledge gap left behind cannot simply be filled by recent graduates. The most stable answer is to extend and deepen the working lives of those who are already here, which means taking the ageing workforce UK 2026 challenge seriously at employer, policy and design level simultaneously.

    The inheritance and wealth dimension matters here too. As explored in coverage of inheritance tax changes affecting UK families, many households in the 55-to-70 age bracket are simultaneously managing peak caring responsibilities, pension uncertainty and uncertain employment prospects. The financial squeeze is real, and it affects how willing people are to remain economically active.

    What good looks like, and who is doing it

    B&Q has quietly become something of a benchmark. The company has long maintained above-average rates of over-50 employment, and its internal data suggests older workers bring measurably lower absence rates and higher customer satisfaction scores in advisory roles. Barclays introduced a returners programme specifically for people over 50 who had been out of financial services for several years. These are not charity initiatives; they are commercial decisions grounded in evidence.

    Government could help considerably by removing some of the structural disincentives. The interaction between pension drawdown and employment income creates real complexity for people who want to phase their retirement gradually rather than stop abruptly. Simpler taper rules, clearer guidance from HMRC on flexible drawdown, and age-neutral apprenticeship funding would all make a material difference. The DWP consultations of the past two years have edged in this direction, but the pace has frustrated advocates.

    What is clear is that treating the ageing workforce UK 2026 question as primarily a welfare issue misses the point. This is an economic productivity question, a fiscal sustainability question, and a workplace design question all at once. Employers who get ahead of it will have access to stable, experienced talent in a tight labour market. Those who keep looking the other way will pay for it, one way or another.

    Frequently Asked Questions

    What proportion of UK workers are currently over 50?

    Roughly one in three workers in the UK is currently aged 50 or over, according to ONS labour market data. That share has been rising steadily and is projected to reach closer to two in five by 2030.

    What is the DWP doing to support older workers in 2026?

    The DWP has extended its midlife review programme and updated its 50 PLUS: Choices guidance to push Jobcentre Plus advisers towards genuine retraining options for economically inactive over-50s. Conditionality rules under Universal Credit have also been widened to cover some previously exempt groups.

    How does the rising state pension age affect older workers?

    The state pension age is rising to 67 by 2028, with a government review potentially accelerating the move to 68. This is particularly challenging for workers in physically demanding roles who cannot easily maintain full-time employment until the later age without significant changes to how their work is structured.

  • Children’s Mental Health Provision in England Is in Freefall, and CAMHS Waiting Lists Tell Only Half the Story

    Children’s Mental Health Provision in England Is in Freefall, and CAMHS Waiting Lists Tell Only Half the Story

    The headline figures are bad enough. Across England, more than 400,000 children and young people are currently waiting for mental health support through Child and Adolescent Mental Health Services, according to NHS data published earlier this year. But the number itself is almost beside the point. What CAMHS waiting lists cannot capture is the texture of the crisis: the 14-year-old sitting with her GP for the fourth appointment in three months because there is nowhere else to refer her, the exhausted school counsellor absorbing caseloads that would test a senior clinician, the parent ringing 111 at 2am because their child is in crisis and the local crisis team is at capacity.

    Young person in a therapy session, representing the realities behind CAMHS waiting lists in England
    Photo by Mikhail Nilov on Pexels

    I’ve spoken to parents, clinicians, and charity workers across the Midlands and the North over the past few weeks, and the picture they describe is not one of isolated failure. It is systemic. The architecture of children’s mental health provision in England was already strained before the pandemic; what happened after 2020 did not create the problem, it simply removed the last structural buffers. What we are left with is a service that is, in many areas, operating as a crisis response rather than a health service.

    The postcode lottery that determines a child’s chances

    Provision varies so dramatically between NHS integrated care board areas that it is genuinely difficult to describe CAMHS as a single national service. In some parts of London, children with moderate anxiety can access therapy within eight weeks. In rural areas of Lincolnshire, Cumbria, and coastal Suffolk, the same referral might result in a wait of eighteen months or more. The NHS England data dashboard for children’s mental health shows access rates ranging from under 30 per cent to over 50 per cent depending on the integrated care board, yet national targets treat these areas as equivalent.

    This is not simply a staffing problem, though staffing is acute. It is also a commissioning problem. Integrated care boards have significant discretion over how mental health budgets are allocated, and children’s services have historically lost out in competition with urgent adult provision. The children’s mental health charity Young Minds has been raising this point for years, but in 2026 the evidence has become harder to dismiss. Referral thresholds in some areas have been raised so high that children presenting with moderate depression and self-harm are told they do not meet criteria for CAMHS intervention, and are instead directed towards school-based support that is itself chronically underfunded.

    Why children keep ending up in A&E

    A&E is not a mental health setting. The wards are loud, the waits are long, and the staff, however well-meaning, are not trained as child psychiatrists. Yet for thousands of children each year, a trip to the emergency department is the only point of genuine contact with mental health provision they will get. NHS England figures show that mental health presentations by under-18s at A&E increased by around 22 per cent between 2019 and 2025, and the trend has not reversed.

    Child waiting in A&E, illustrating the pressure on emergency departments caused by CAMHS waiting list failures
    Photo by RDNE Stock project on Pexels

    The logic, perverse as it sounds, is rational. A child who presents at A&E in crisis cannot be turned away. The threshold for intervention there is clinical risk, not the commissioning criteria that govern CAMHS referrals. So families have learnt, or been quietly advised, that acute presentation is sometimes the only route into the system. One GP in Sheffield told me, candidly, that she would not normally suggest this to a family but that she had done so in cases where a child had been waiting over a year and was deteriorating. That a doctor should find herself in that position is a measure of how far the system has failed.

    The consequences ripple outward. Paediatric wards end up holding children in mental health crisis for days or weeks because there is no suitable inpatient psychiatric bed available. NHS data from 2025 showed that on any given day, an average of 90 children in England were being held in paediatric wards solely for mental health reasons, waiting for a placement. These beds cost far more than community-based early intervention would, and they deliver far worse outcomes.

    Early intervention: permanently promised, never properly funded

    The phrase “early intervention” has appeared in every children’s mental health strategy document produced by the Department of Health since at least 2011. It appears in the NHS Long Term Plan. It appears in the government’s SEND review. It will, I would wager, appear in whatever strategy document follows this one. What it has not consistently appeared in is the actual budget allocations at local level, where the decisions that determine a child’s access to care are actually made.

    The structural problem is that early intervention spending produces results over years, not quarters. A child who receives good therapeutic support at 12 is less likely to present in crisis at 15, less likely to require inpatient care at 17, less likely to struggle with employment and housing at 25. These outcomes are real but diffuse, and they accrue across multiple budgets and departments. The Treasury does not receive credit for a crisis that did not happen. So the investment keeps being deferred in favour of crisis response, which is more expensive and less effective, but more legible to short-term spending cycles.

    There is also a workforce dimension that is rarely discussed plainly. Training a child and adolescent psychotherapist takes years. The pipeline is not something any government can fix quickly even if the political will exists. In 2026, NHS England estimates a shortage of roughly 1,200 qualified CAMHS clinicians across England. Universities are training more, but recruitment into NHS roles, against a private sector that pays considerably better, remains a persistent drag. The gap between children from different socioeconomic backgrounds in accessing quality support is widening alongside the clinical workforce shortage, compounding disadvantage in the most straightforward way possible.

    What schools are being asked to absorb

    In the absence of functional early intervention, schools have become the de facto first tier of mental health provision for most children in England. This is not what they were designed for. A school counsellor with a caseload of 80 young people cannot provide the evidence-based therapeutic input that a trained CAMHS clinician would. They can listen, refer, and support in a general sense, but they cannot substitute for clinical care.

    The government’s Mental Health Support Teams, rolled out to expand school-based provision, have been welcomed by headteachers but are not yet anywhere near universal coverage. As of early 2026, they reach approximately 45 per cent of pupils in England. The remaining 55 per cent are in schools that have whatever their own budget allows, which in many cases is little beyond a part-time counsellor funded through the pupil premium. The parallel with other infrastructure crises is not subtle; as I’ve written previously about the physical state of school buildings, the invisible infrastructure of pastoral and mental health support is deteriorating alongside the brickwork.

    The strain is showing in teacher retention as much as in pupil outcomes. Staff are leaving roles partly because the pastoral burden has become unmanageable. A head of year is not a social worker or a therapist, but in many schools they are functioning as both. That is not a sustainable model, and the wider pattern of skilled professionals leaving public sector roles because the conditions are untenable applies here as sharply as anywhere.

    What would actually help

    I am cautious about adding to the long list of policy recommendations that have not been implemented, but a few things are reasonably clear from the evidence. Ring-fenced funding for CAMHS that cannot be raided at integrated care board level would address one of the most consistent failure points. A serious expansion of the educational pipeline for child and adolescent mental health clinicians, with bursaries to compete with the private sector, would begin to address the workforce gap over a five to seven-year horizon. And a genuine shift in how early intervention outcomes are measured and rewarded across departmental budgets would require Treasury agreement, which is the hardest part of all.

    None of this requires novel ideas. Every one of these proposals has appeared in a review or strategy document within the past decade. The gap is not knowledge but political priority. In the meantime, the families waiting for CAMHS appointments, the GPs making referrals they know will take eighteen months to process, and the A&E departments absorbing what the community system cannot, are all paying the cost of a structural failure that successive governments have been content to acknowledge and defer. Incidentally, one of the more creative uses of technology I have seen in community health engagement recently was a charity in Bristol using 3d print services to produce tactile therapeutic tools for young people with sensory processing difficulties, a small example of how resource-constrained services are finding unusual solutions. It should not have to be unusual.

  • The English Devolution Experiment: What Giving Mayors More Power Actually Looks Like in Practice

    The English Devolution Experiment: What Giving Mayors More Power Actually Looks Like in Practice

    There is a version of this story in which metro mayors are quietly transforming English cities, cutting through bureaucracy, commanding serious investment and making decisions that Whitehall would have sat on for a decade. There is another version in which the whole devolution settlement is an elaborate performance: powers handed over with such conditions attached that the people receiving them can barely move. In 2026, both versions are true, simultaneously, depending on which city you’re standing in and which Tuesday of the month it is.

    Empty council chamber representing English devolution mayors 2026 decision-making structures

    The English devolution mayors 2026 story is not a simple triumph or a cautionary tale. It is messier and more instructive than either. Greater Manchester and the West Midlands are the two most-watched experiments, and what they reveal about the limits and genuine possibilities of devolved power in England deserves a closer read than the headlines usually afford.

    What Greater Manchester has actually achieved

    Andy Burnham’s Manchester is the closest England has to a genuinely functioning city-region government. The integrated transport authority, Transport for Greater Manchester, now controls the Bee Network, a reintegrated bus system that, since franchising replaced the deregulated free-for-all in 2023, has expanded routes and brought fares under public control. By early 2026, the Bee Network covers all ten Greater Manchester districts. Patronage is up. The political credit is real.

    On housing, Greater Manchester’s spatial development strategy sets binding targets across the ten local authorities rather than leaving each council to argue its corner in isolation. That matters because it forces a level of regional coordination that the old structure simply couldn’t produce. The mayoral combined authority has also used its investment powers to anchor the NOMA development in the city centre and push affordable housing requirements in ways that individual local authorities, facing developer pressure alone, rarely managed.

    Skills and employment are another area where the Manchester model has delivered. The Greater Manchester Good Employment Charter, a voluntary but increasingly influential framework that over 300 employers have signed, sets standards on pay, flexible working and contracts. It is not legally binding, but it has created reputational pressure in a tight labour market. These are not nothing. They are the kinds of pragmatic, local interventions that central government, managing policy for 56 million people, consistently fails to calibrate.

    The West Midlands: a different kind of ambition

    Richard Parker, who succeeded Andy Street as West Midlands Mayor in 2024, inherited a combined authority with strong infrastructure investment credentials and genuine private-sector relationships. The West Midlands secured the UK’s largest urban regeneration zone outside London, and the Commonwealth Games legacy investment reshaped parts of Birmingham in ways that are still compounding.

    The Integrated Rail Plan, though significantly scaled back from original proposals, still positions the West Midlands for better connectivity. The region’s investment in SEND (special educational needs and disabilities) provision, using devolved skills funding, is drawing attention from other combined authorities looking for workable models. Parker has been less publicly flamboyant than Burnham, which suits a region that often felt London-centric commentary treated it as a curiosity rather than a serious economic zone.

    The West Midlands also has the most developed single settlement agreement of any English combined authority outside London, giving it pooled funding across housing, transport and skills rather than having to negotiate each pot separately. On paper, this is exactly the kind of structural shift that makes devolution meaningful. In practice, the settlement still comes with performance conditions, reporting requirements and ministerial override clauses that would make any serious regional government blush.

    Where Westminster is quietly pulling the strings

    Here is where the story gets uncomfortable. The Treasury has not surrendered fiscal control in any meaningful sense. Combined authorities receive grant settlements, they do not set their own tax rates, they cannot borrow freely against future revenues, and they cannot run deficits in the way that comparable city-regions in Germany or the United States can. When Birmingham City Council issued a Section 114 notice in 2023, effectively declaring insolvency, the mayoral combined authority had no mechanism to intervene. That structural problem has not been resolved.

    The Levelling Up and Regeneration Act 2023 created a framework for further devolution, but the pace at which powers have actually transferred has disappointed most metro mayors. The government’s own English Devolution White Paper, published in December 2024, proposed a more systematic approach to mayoral authority over planning, skills and employment support. Whether the legislation that follows actually delivers on that framing remains the central question of 2026. Early signs from the government’s English devolution policy documents suggest genuine intent, but the Treasury’s grip on capital spending means intent and delivery remain some distance apart.

    Transport is the clearest illustration of this gap. Outside Greater Manchester, bus franchising powers remain largely unused because the upfront cost of transitioning from deregulation is prohibitive without Treasury support. South Yorkshire, West Yorkshire and the North East all have combined authorities with transport powers on paper. In reality, they are running variations of the same broken privatised bus system that has been failing passengers since the 1986 deregulation. The power exists; the funding to exercise it does not.

    The accountability question nobody wants to answer

    Metro mayors have accumulated real visibility. Burnham in particular has become a national political figure. But democratic accountability at the combined authority level remains thin. Scrutiny committees exist but lack the resources to hold well-staffed mayoral offices to account. Local ward councillors, the closest elected representatives to most residents, often find themselves excluded from decisions that directly affect their areas. This is not a reason to abandon the devolution project; it is a reason to take its democratic infrastructure as seriously as its investment pipelines.

    There are also sharp inequalities in the devolution settlement itself. The eight mayoral combined authorities in England cover around 19 million people. The remaining 37 million live in areas with either no combined authority, a county council deal without a mayor, or arrangements so recent they have yet to produce anything resembling a coherent regional strategy. Cornwall, for example, has a devolution deal but not a mayor and not the same suite of powers. Rural England, in particular, risks being left further behind as city-regions consolidate influence and investment. This connects to a broader pattern: the parts of the country least visible to Westminster have always been last in the queue. As we’ve examined in our coverage of Britain’s brain drain, the geography of economic opportunity in England remains stubbornly concentrated, and devolution has not yet proved it can correct that.

    What genuine devolution would actually require

    The countries that have made regional government work, Germany’s Länder, Spain’s autonomous communities, Scandinavian municipalities, share one characteristic that England’s combined authorities lack: genuine fiscal autonomy. The ability to raise revenue locally, borrow against it and make long-term capital commitments without ministerial approval is not a nice-to-have. It is the difference between a regional government and a regional delivery mechanism for central government priorities.

    The English devolution mayors 2026 picture is one of genuine but constrained progress. The ambition in Manchester and the West Midlands is real. The people running these combined authorities are, by and large, more pragmatic and locally informed than the departments they are trying to work around. But the constitutional settlement has not changed. England remains one of the most centralised large democracies in the developed world, and handing a mayor control of bus routes while keeping control of the money does not fundamentally alter that. The experiment is worth continuing. But calling it a revolution, at this stage, is flattering the evidence.

    For context on how Westminster’s reluctance to relinquish control manifests across other domains, our analysis of Britain’s agricultural subsidy overhaul and the leasehold reform process both demonstrate a familiar pattern: structural change promised, structural change delayed, and the gap filled with announcements rather than outcomes.

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