Lifelines
Between 2010 and 2030, there will be seismic demographic changes taking place that will create a new society. There will be ever fewer young people and young adults, ever more older workers, pensioners and elderly people. Society cannot sustain its current models and structures because an ever smaller number of working people would have to provide for an ever growing retired and elderly population and cope with excessive demand on health and social services.
Lifelines is a multi partnership project in Brighton to explore new models of what a socially and economically active and healthy population of older people would look like.
BCP's role is to explore the impact of these trends on employers and businesses and has found a considerable body of research in this area that shows that employers will have to:-
Move to a model of gradual retirement and productively employing people well beyond the age of 65 with great flexibility of how much, when and where work is carried out.
Move to a wider conception of employment - a"Life Cycle" approach in which capabilities and employability of people are continuously developed in line with their own well being
Support employees to maintain their well being which include notions of work life balance, physical and mental health, career breaks, effective workplace design etc
Create inter-generational teams to facilitate maintenance of skills and knowledge base and social cohesion generally
The next step for BCP is find and work with local employers who, not withstanding the long term nature of these demographic trends, wish to engage with such policies and tool kits would be developed with them. The advantage for early engagement would be enhanced competiveness in this new demographic environment.
