Life expectancy may be rising but our bodies can’t necessarily cope with working until we are 70
If you are counting the years until you can retire, then don’t move to Denmark. The country has just passed a law nudging the official retirement age up to 70, which will take effect in 2040, for people born in 1971 or later.
But Denmark is not the only place with this idea.
The UK state pension age used to be 60 for women and 65 for men. It is currently 66 for everyone, but it will increase – in stages – up to 67 for people born after April 1960.
Many think that it will eventually rise further still – and a European country passing a pension age of 70 for the first time seems a significant milestone.
It is enough to make people wonder if their bodies could cope with working when they have been in this world for seven decades, and whether they will be in good enough health to enjoy their retirement years.
Obviously people’s physical and mental fitness is hugely variable. But governments have to make decisions based on population averages. So, what does the science say?
Rising life expectancy
It is undeniable that average life expectancy has been generally increasing in most countries over the 20th and 21st centuries, although in the past decade or so the rise has slowed and perhaps plateaued.
In the UK, a girl born in the early 20th century could expect to live to 52. Life expectancy for women today, by contrast, is 83.
But the driver for raising the retirement age has not been people’s personal life expectancy but an economic one.
It is based on the fact that an ageing population means there are proportionally fewer working-age people paying into Treasury coffers compared with the number of older people drawing the state pension. “The main pressure is a political one, concerned with pension costs,” said Professor Alan Walker, a sociologist at the University of Sheffield.
When it comes to people’s ability to last until retirement age, and have some good quality years between retirement and ill health, we don’t just need to consider people’s lifespan but also their “health span”, said Professor Richard Faragher, a gerontologist at the University of Brighton.
Health span, also called healthy life expectancy, is the number of years that someone is statistically likely to live in good general health.
Unfortunately, the rise in lifespan over the past couple of decades has not been matched by parallel rises in their health span, according to a 2021 House of Lords report called Ageing: Science, Technology and Healthy Living.
In 2009, for instance, men could expect to live to 62.7 in good health, compared with 63.1 in 2016 – an increase of 0.4 years. During the same period, life expectancy for men rose by 0.8 years.
For females, health span actually fell by 0.2 years over the same period, while lifespan rose by 0.6 years.
In other words, while lifespan has been nudging up, the amount of time that we spend in poor health before dying has been expanding. “Right now, we are spending more money to keep older people in worse health,” said Professor Faragher.
People with lower incomes, who tend to need the state pension more than their peers, are more likely to be doing physical jobs and may have to stop work earlier as their bodies can no longer cope. “Ill health tends to force people in lower socio-economic strata to retire earlier than they would wish to,” said Professor Faragher.
Sense of purpose
Continuing to work at older ages may not be a negative for everyone. As long as someone’s health is up to it, it can help to give people a sense of purpose, said Dr Mark Cortnage, a public health researcher at Anglia Ruskin University.
A job can also provide mental challenges, and doctors generally recommend trying to keep up intellectual stimulation to help stay sharp. It may even lower the risk of developing Alzheimer’s disease or other forms of dementia.
But the evidence of this approach for dementia prevention is still uncertain. Plus, there are many other ways to keep up mental stimulation, such as volunteering or looking after grandchildren.
Whether our lifespan and health span will continue rising is an open question. Some scientists have previously made bold claims that it will. Demographer James Vaupel has predicted that if trends continue, most babies born in western countries since 2000 will live at least until they are 100.
But Professor David Gems, a biogerontologist at University College London, is sceptical. “That is a biology-free extrapolation, assuming that things will just carry on into the future, which is completely unrealistic,” he said.
But this is unlikely to be a factor in decision making on pensions. “People may be in slightly poor health, but it doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re too ill to work,” said Professor Gems.
“The harsh and brutal reality is that we have an ever-increasing population of older people and fewer younger people.”
