This week I return to familiar ground and make no apology for having another look at demographic trends and our ageing population, a subject which has recently been the focus of attention for the new coalition government.

Last week Jack Goldstone, the author of ‘The New Population Bomb’ was speaking in Brussels, and gave some striking statistics of how the developed and developing worlds will change over the next 30-40 years:

• The proportion of global GDP produced by Europe, the United States, and Canada fell from 68 percent in 1950 to 47 percent in 2003 and is expected to be less than 30 percent by 2050;
•  In the near future, for the first time in history a third of Europe’s population is expected to be over 60. Even if only 10-20% of this part of the population requires medical care, the costs will be huge, he said;
• 90% of those aged under 15 years today live in developing countries.

So what action is being taken at the national level? Over the last two weeks, the UK government has introduced two proposals with regard to meeting the twin challenges of our ageing population and immigration. First of all, the Work and Pensions Secretary, Iain Duncan Smith, last week announced plans to raise the pension age to 66 by 2016, ten years earlier than planned by Labour, and to scrap the default retirement age of 65 while also planning to take “…a frank look at the relationship between state pension age and life expectancy”, something suggested in this blog late last year.

Then on Monday this week, the Home Secretary, Theresa May, announced a cut of 1,300 in the number of skilled workers coming to the UK from outside the EU while the government carries out a consultation on proposals for a permanent cap. Immigration minister Damian Green said it was important to “….strike the right balance so that we can bring in the people that Britain needs but not at the rate we have had over the past decade that has given rise to so much tension”.

With people living longer, the government is right to encourage people to work longer and to make sure that we continue to attract the most skilled workers available to contribute to our economy, while recognising also the reality that Labour’s open door approach to immigration has produced real tensions in some of our towns and cities.

It would be forward looking if there was to be a third set of proposals setting out how technologies can facilitate the ageing process. At a seminar which I organised in Thame earlier this year on the subject, it was mentioned that new Japanese initiatives for monitoring of the elderly have been tested in Buckinghamshire, while future developments could include tele-care and tele-medicine. Supporting investments in new technologies which could reduce medical costs (for example by changing the way we store medical records) and also increase the ability of less-mobile, older workers to work longer will be a crucial element to any future strategy.

For those interested, the short video below highlights some more information on the pace of technological change currently underway:

Demographic Trends, Migration