Are Politicians Too Focused on Older Generations? (Your Radical Questions with Professor Sarah Harper)

**Amol Rajan** (0:08)
Hello and welcome to Your Radical Questions, where we put your questions to one of our guests. This is your chance to engage directly with the radical people we have in this podcast, and to ask them their ideas for the future.
I've still got Professor Sarah Harper with me. Sarah is a Professor of Gerontology at the University of Oxford, and an expert on demographic change, ageing populations and the way societies adapt to longer lives. If you haven't heard our conversation from last Thursday, do go back and listen. We talked about why she believes our pension systems, workplaces and welfare states are still built around outdated assumptions about ageing, and why she thinks it's time to rethink how and when people contribute through their lives. We also explored what an ageing society really means, whether longer lives should be seen as an opportunity rather than a crisis, and what a more flexible approach to work and retirement might look like. If you haven't listened yet, I'd definitely recommend going back and checking out that episode first. But now, Sarah is here to answer the radical questions that you've sent in.
Sarah, thanks again for being here.

**Sarah Harper** (1:14)
Thank you.

**Amol Rajan** (1:15)
Kathy from Wales has sent some of her observations on the subject and a question. Let's have a listen.

**Sarah Harper** (1:21)
Hi Sarah, it's Kathy here in Cardiff. I am 65 years old and will become eligible for my state pension at 67 I'm still working as I'm one of my age group who is not wallowing in unimaginable mountains of money, contrary to popular misconceptions. I am also still working because I enjoy it. In addition, I make and will continue to make voluntary contributions to my local community regardless of what age I get to. It is frustrating that my generation and those a little older are perceived of as overprivileged but worse, a burden on society. I know you are someone who is working hard to change this narrative. Quite rightly too, as older people are contributing in so many ways and continue to contribute even if they are experiencing challenges to their mobility, eyesight, hearing or cognitive function. So my question is this, what can be done to get politicians and policymakers in general to engage with the real life stories of older people and how they are contributing whether that be financial capital, social capital or in any of the other ways that are rarely included in economic calculations?
What a wonderful question and what a wonderful statement from Cathy.
That is absolutely spot on. I think Cathy represents a huge number of people who are over 55, over 60 Here she is. She understands the importance of being contributory. And again, I mean, this idea, and I think it actually came up in our discussion last week, the idea that all older adults in their 60s and 70s are sitting on mountains of money. I think we have nearly a third of our population dependent on the state pension. Sorry, a third of our older population dependent on the state pension. Cathy is representative of so many older adults out there. Behind the scenes, a lot of politicians are working on this.
I was very involved in a big government review of this, and we actually managed to get it into the 2017 industrial strategy. So politicians are interested. Cathy, continue to tell your story. I think it's wonderful.

**Amol Rajan** (3:28)
What do you make of the idea that probably a lot of people, a lot of my friends would say is that politicians are spending way too much time paying attention to older voters. Younger people are ignored, and older people just have more power in our democracy. Do you think that's a complete misconception? What's your answer to that?

**Sarah Harper** (3:43)
Very, very interesting. So all the surveys showed that actually, despite this misconception, many or most older people do not vote on age lines. Because older people, remember, they are often linked into families and they're concerned about their children and they're concerned about their grandchildren, for example. The problem is that for many years, politicians believe that they do. So politicians, 20, 25 years ago, politicians would really start pushing things they thought would be attractive to an older population because they believed that older people would vote things that were just for them. And I just want to give a statistic that actually people often don't realise. So in terms of numbers, more people over 65 in this country voted to remain in the Brexit referendum than people under 25
And that's because people under 25 didn't vote in the referendum. And if those under 25 had voted, then we might have had a very, very different result. And to a certain extent, that shows that it is so important that politicians focus on younger people and engage them. And if there is one message to politicians, it's stop worrying about the older voter because older voters are going to vote for things that they believe in, not necessarily because they're 65 or 70