This is the first in a series of briefings about how the impact of various changes in the social, technological and economic world will have on charities and non-profits. They are designed to help organisations think about how their world will change, and is changing, because of the pressures from the world around them.
The first in the series is about the impact of an ageing population. Its worth saying that an ageing population in the UK is a bundle of different changes. Firstly it is about people living longer, it is also about the falling number of young people in the population, and the impact that the changing ratio of young to old has on society.
The statistics
More older people
The House of Commons library in a briefing[1] summarises the changes like this: The UK’s population is also ageing. In 2022, there were around 12.7 million people aged 65 or over in the UK, making up 19% of the population. According to the ONS’s population projections, by 2072 this could rise to 22.1 million people, or 27% of the population. By contrast, 50 years ago in 1972 there were around 7.5 million people aged 65 or over, or 13% of the population. This is shown in chart 1 below. Notice how the shape of the population changes above and below the red line, over the 100 year period of the chart.
[1] https://commonslibrary.parliament.uk/the-uks-changing-population/#:~:text=An%20ageing%20population,but%20higher%20than%20some%20countries.
Less young people
Our fertility rate in the UK was its lowest ever in 2022 and 2023[1], with the lowest number of babies being born (591,000) since 1977 and given the high numbers of women of child-bearing age the lowest fertility rate since 1938.
The chart below from the same House of Commons briefing shows the net impact on population size from births, deaths and migration. The current estimate is that the UK population will start shrinking in the mid-2030s without inward migration: in other words more deaths than births, and this is shown in the light green bars.
The economics
More poverty in old age
It’s hard not to think that poverty will increase as we have more people, living longer. Over the next 50 years those over age 65 will increase by 75%. Even over the next decade, while pensions are still relatively good, there are going to be more and more people who will struggle to make ends meet, as cost of living increases drive up prices. In 20 or 30 years’ time as we will have more and more people hitting retirement who don’t have a defined benefit pension scheme (eg 25/60th of final leaving salary) but a private pension plan without enough money in it, the levels of poverty could be even higher. One calculation is that to have a pension of roughly £20,000 a year then a private pension pot of around £360,000 is needed[3] and this typically means putting 10-15% of salary into a pension for as much as 40 years[4] So charities will probably need to be helping deal with a growth in large numbers of increasing elderly people whose pensions simply don’t cover their needs.
Demand for housing increasing
As people live longer the number of houses needed to support them goes up – the UK population is forecast to increase by nearly 8 million people between 2021 and 2036[5]. As we get increasing numbers of single people, either because their spouse has died, or they never had a partner, then where a couple used to have one house, now two are needed. So government, housing associations and homelessness charities will need to build or campaign for an ever increasing number of new properties. It’s hard to see an end to the shortage of housing, particularly social housing, anytime soon – its one of the reasons the new Labour Government is focusing so hard on building new houses, by changing the planning regime. Whether anybody but the wealthiest in London and the South-East can afford them is another matter.
[4] https://www.legalandgeneral.com/retirement/pensions/guides/how-much-should-i-put-into-my-pension/
[5]https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/populationandmigration/populationprojections/bulletins/nationalpopulationprojections/2021basedinterim
No end to the need for immigration
With an increasing number of people living longer, and needing both health and social care support, we will need an increasing number of people to look after them. For all the talk of Artificial Intelligence taking jobs, the need for workers to look after elderly people, or be nurses, or care staff, or doctors, or social workers is only going to go up – see the pale green bars in chart 2 for immigration. And with the number of people of working age staying static or decreasing, the need for immigration to fill those roles is hard to escape. So expect those charities dealing with race-hate, refugees, immigration policy and the like all to be kept busy in the future.
No end to the squeeze on govt finances
There are many who call for an end to austerity in the current climate. This in effect means increasing taxes or reducing expenditure or increasing borrowing to provide more government expenditure. National debt has increased by more than 36.5% of our economy in 2009 to 98.5% in 2024[6], and servicing that debt is around 8% of government expenditure.
Increasing numbers of people living longer, needing health and social care support, and many in degrees of poverty can only mean a continued squeeze on government finances. Pensions are £140 billion a year of government expenditure, and that is only likely to increase as a percentage of spending. If we go on borrowing, we are loading our children and our children’s children with a growing burden of interest repayment. There are no easy solutions to the growing demand on government finances, and no likelihood that charities will find government is a ready source of funding again.
Health and social
If the economic impact of the ageing population is likely to be severe, what about the impact on health and social issues.
More lonely and isolated people
As we get more and more people living longer and longer, it’s inevitable that there will be more and more isolated and lonely people (many living in poverty). This is because a frail 95-year-old may have frail offspring in their seventies who don’t live anywhere near them or can’t travel easily. It will also be because couples are increasingly likely to find that while a man dies in his seventies, his spouse might live another 20 or 30 years. So for those charities which provide social services for older people, there is a likely only to be in an increase in demand.
[6]https://www.ons.gov.uk/economy/governmentpublicsectorandtaxes/publicsectorfinance/timeseries/hf6x/pusf
Digital have and have-nots
Over the coming decades the way that people access the world is only going to be increasingly online. Indeed, there are few under the age of 60 who aren’t part of the digital world (and poverty is a major factor in exclusion from the digital world). As today’s 40 and 50 somethings reach retirement age it is fair to assume that they will be digitally literate. But whether they are digitally literate for the world they will then be living in at the age of 90, is another matter – most in their 50s today are fine with email, but what about using smartphone apps for paying bills, or public transport, or making online purchases. And being online also means having the right equipment – how many of us are using a phone or laptop or tablet that is more than five years old. So poverty on its own may increase social exclusion, by making it hard to have the equipment needed to keep up with the digital world. Even the world of being a couple is changed by the digital era. In the 1930s 40% of couples met through friends, family or school. By the 1980s friends, co-workers and in bars took up 60%, and today online takes a staggering 60% of all couples.[7] Are charities well enough integrated into the digital world to stay relevant?
Farewell the Big C and welcome the Big D
100 years ago the Spanish Flu just after the first world war, killed around 20 million people. Today dementia is our biggest killer in the UK, followed by heart disease[8] (the lack of cancer on this last stat may be due to the national statistics being split into different cancers).
Increasingly though people are surviving longer and longer with cancer, and the same is true of many other once fatal diseases. So as people live longer and longer with cancer will we come to see it in the same way we see sciatica, or migraines, or chronic fatigue: deeply debilitating but far from a killer disease. Indeed, our assessment of the worst diseases may switch from being those that end life, but those which take away people’s quality of life. So on that basis in 25 years’ time, we may see dementia being as much feared and fundraised for, as cancer is today.
Charity services
There are a range of ways in which services and activities for charities might change. Here are three suggestions:
More relationship guidance for older people
As people live longer the time period when a couple are together in old age gets longer. Back in the 1920s, when a man only lived an average of 3 years after retiring and had been out all day at work in the working years before that, there was little time for retirement relationships to be tested. In today’s world the strains on many relationships can only increase when somebody may live 30 years after retiring, may have career changes or periods of unemployment, or expect a retirement of leisure which they can’t afford.
[8]https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/bulletins/deathsregistrationsummarytables/2022
So people will need support and advice on how to deal with this changing world, and probably not just partners. Parents will need help dealing with their impoverished children or grandchildren. Children will need help dealing with their parents who have inadequate pensions and chronic illnesses. Equally 70 year olds will need help negotiating the world of dating and new relationships. The number of ways that people may need help from charities in negotiating relationships can only increase. It’s still much cheaper for society to spend £1000 on marriage guidance then build a second house when two elderly people separate.
More debt-advice and financial support charities
As it gets harder and harder to put sufficient money aside for a personal pension, and government provision is cut back, many people will find it difficult to get by. So expect those charities that provide debt and financial provision, as well as benefits advice, to see an ever growing set of demand for support. We might also expect to see a growth in the benevolent funds that cater for specific professions, and a growth in employees feeling they need to support their own professions’ benevolent funds.
Struggle for the causes not in the political or media spotlight.
From the ideas put out in this blog, it’s not hard to see how charities who deal with older people, or poverty, or money advice, might find themselves in the media spotlight, or getting increase levels of political interest or government funding. The converse is that those causes that don’t appear to tackle an issue that society sees as relevant, may find it harder to raise money and harder to get their voice heard. We see this already in government funding with the way that NHS funding is a hot political potato, but funding of police and prisons and local government has been relatively easy to cut. So charities which aren’t in the public eye will need to work twice as hard to get their message across.
Fundraising
Less money for giving and less time for volunteering
The pressures on the finances of almost every age group of society under 50 is going to be under pressure. Today’s 30-year-olds are needing to put 10-15% of their income into pensions, pay their student debts, save for the deposit on a house, and so on. In 20 years’ time those pressure will only increase, as they may need to support parents or relatives who don’t have adequate pensions, while dealing with a jobs market that is uncertain and a career that has many phases. So how amongst all this financial pressure are they going to find time to volunteer or money to give?
A decade or so of legacy feast followed by legacy famine
Baby boomers are currently hitting their seventies. They have good pensions and own lots of property. So for the next 10 or maybe even 20 years they will have the ability to give generously through legacies. However, as a generation comes to retirement who have worse pensions, who are trying to get themselves or their children on the housing ladder, who may be providing for their parents who need expensive residential care, the amount available for leaving in a legacy may not be as great. So the advice to charities is to grow their legacy income now, while they still can.
This list of impacts on charities is far from exhaustive. And indeed every charity should always be working out how the changing economic and social fabric of our society may impact on them in the future. Two useful publications are ‘Look nfpSynergy did my PEST analysis for me’ available here https://nfpresearch.com/free-report/pest-analysis-nonprofit-sector-2018 and on the specific area of an ageing population NPC produce a very useful report from their Commission on ageing and the charity sector https://www.thinknpc.org/resource-hub/decision-time-will-the-voluntary-sector-embrace-the-age-of-opportunity/
Joe Saxton
October 2024
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