Redefining Retirement: Is Our Ageing Population an Untapped Asset? (Professor Sarah Harper)

**Jenny Clemon** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Jenny Clemon. I'm a journalist and author, and next week, I'll be with you on Radical. My guest will be Neil Woods. He's a former police officer and undercover drugs operative who's gone on a very radical journey and arrived at a very radical idea. He's campaigning to completely overhaul our approach to drugs in the UK. He wants to decriminalise the drugs market, all of it, and place it under government regulation. That would mean creating legal supplies of cannabis, cocaine, MDMA, even heroin.
Neil argues that our current approach to fighting the illegal drugs trade is making it worse, fuelling organised crime and harming the most vulnerable in society. It's a complex and inevitably controversial subject that touches on economics, public health, criminology and ethics. Just the kind of topic we love your help in tackling. So please send us your questions for Neil, so you can help us have this really interesting conversation.
Please leave us a WhatsApp voice note on plus 44 330 123 9480 Or you can email us on radical at BBC dot co dot UK. I'll be back with you very soon. But now on with this week's episode.

**James Marriott** (1:28)
Hello, and welcome to Radical, conversations about the underlying forces reshaping our world and the radical ideas that could define the future. I'm James Marriott, and today we're talking about something that is often presented as one of the biggest challenges facing the Western world, aging populations. People are living longer, and fewer children are being born, and you've probably seen or heard in the news, even on this very program, that this is often presented as a major crisis. A shrinking working-age population is going to have to support growing numbers of unproductive pensioners. But my guest this week thinks we're looking at it all the wrong way. Rather than fearing an aging society, she says we should see it as an opportunity. Her name is Sarah Harper, she's a professor of gerontology at Oxford University and one of the world's leading experts on population aging. Her radical proposal is that we should embrace a future with an older population.
Sarah argues that our pensions, welfare systems and workplaces are still built around an outdated idea of later life. That people become frail in their 50s or early 60s, retire for a short period and then die. She wants to radically change the state pension entirely. And base the pension income you receive on how long you've contributed, rather than on how old you are. Her proposal, she says, is not simply about making people work for longer. It is about completely rethinking how we contribute throughout our lives. And also about asking whether chronological age should continue to so rigidly determine the way we work.
But would her idea create a fairer and more flexible system, or just introduce a whole new set of inequalities? And are our workplaces, welfare state and economy really ready for such a fundamental rethink? As always on this podcast, we'll go in with an open mind and a critical lens. So with all of that in mind, I hope you enjoy my conversation with Professor Sarah Harper.
Sarah, thanks so much for joining us on Radical.

**Sarah Harper** (3:41)
Thank you for having me.

**James Marriott** (3:43)
I wanted to start to fill in people who haven't necessarily been following this debate about an ageing population. And I was wondering if you could explain what's going on with this ageing world that we're facing and why people are so worried about it.

**Sarah Harper** (3:56)
Well, I think we've known for a long time that life expectancy has been increasing and we've been looking about how we could prepare.
I think what really has happened, and it actually happened around COVID, but it doesn't seem to be going back, is that there is a decline in the number of children being born. So the way we have to put this together is that an ageing population is a combination of falling childbearing and falling late life mortality. And that means that the average age of the population goes up. And so why people have become really concerned is that we have a society that's very much geared up to having lots and lots of children being born and entering our labour markets and driving our economies. And most high-income countries and indeed lots of middle-income countries are facing a world where potentially over half the population will be aged between 50 and 100
And so I don't think it's a problem, and I think we've had a lot of time to prepare, it's more that I think instead of some governments, not all, but instead of some governments, are saying, how can we stop this? How can we change it? And we can't. You know, this is just the way that when you have a healthy population and a well-educated population, they tend to live longer, and they tend to have fewer children. So we have to adjust our society to that. And a simple way of looking at it is, many of our 21st century challenges are operating within 20th century institutions. And the whole demographics, particularly around things like work, education, retirement, and how we tend to divide that up, is very much based on a 20th century model.