If we can’t have your money, baby boomers, we want your time. And more specifically, those who qualify as fit and healthy should be asked to serve in a new national service, offering some free days to a nationwide programme, designed locally, to boost the economy.
When a wealth tax is ruled out and council tax reform too difficult, leaving boomer incomes intact, No 10 should consider such a scheme, especially when it could help to mend a society splintered by almost two decades of austerity; not as a punishment for being the lucky generation, but to reuse and repurpose valuable skills, tackle loneliness and build community cohesion.
Young people are often the target of those who believe in national service, and that too could be an important initiative when there are about 1 million 16- to 24-year-olds neither in work, education or training.
But in 2025, asking boomers to put their shoulder to the wheel (one more time) matters because there could be more than half of the UK’s 12 million retirees, many of them after taking early retirement, with good health, few outgoings and decent pots of money who could be part of a national programme tapping into their skills and benefiting local services.
This would be a voluntary scheme and there should be some obvious grounds for exemption. Anyone who can show they regularly look after grandchildren, work in a community organisation or for a charity can opt out. Poor health would also provide a reason to withdraw.
This is not Rishi Sunak’s militaristic vision of national service. Army uniforms will be kept in the warehouse.
There would be a range of options that pensioners – anyone who wants to give something back, or give more back after a lifetime of public service – should find enticing and want to join.
The only element of coercion would be the need to actively opt out by attending a government office and saying no, thank you. Plenty of people will tick an opt-out box without a second’s thought. But plenty of people might sign up if they could join a scheme where they could enjoy the company of others and were properly managed.
It won’t be easy to set up or to run. Ask National Trust staff about how they handle the many volunteers who turn up to garden or show visitors around the charity’s many properties and they will say it’s a challenge.
Many of the jobs that need doing are in services that councils can no longer afford to provide. And before anyone says these should be paid jobs for young people, in most cases council funds will always be too stretched.
Pensioners often complain that they are the target of intergenerational fairness campaigners who fail to understand how long they have worked and how diligently they have saved. It’s true that the British pension system is unfair and was made much worse when it was largely privatised in the 1980s. Pensioner inequality is worse than the inequality we see in the working population.
And there is the way the state pension age fails to acknowledge when people started work, unlike Spain’s, which gives credit to those who started paying national insurance at 16 or 18.
Poverty and inequality is a subject to be addressed by the new Pensions Commission.
National service is more about achieving outcomes for the community by bringing people together as part of a government-supported programme. Lots of older people who report being lonely are also suffering from physical and mental health problems. A national service of support workers could help them to recover some joy in later life.
In Japan, older people are encouraged to look after their peers in their community who are not so fit and healthy. It is a recognition that feeling well and being active in your 60s, while partly a result of good lifestyle choices, is mainly the outcome of good genes.
Likewise, healthy pension pots are a matter of good luck: luck that you were born in an era when employers promised generous occupational retirement schemes or when stock markets soared, usually from the sheer weight of baby boomer cash deployed in equity investments.
Many have enjoyed tax relief at 40% when building their pensions and pay tax at 20% in retirement, while poor pension savers have the same tax on the way in and on the way out of the pension system.
Luck is not something many boomers like to admit is the reason for their comfortable financial situation. They prefer to pat themselves on the back for all their good decisions. They shouldn’t.
Better-off boomers will be wary of proposals for a wealth tax. They will vote against council tax reform, which would clobber them for living in large, high-value properties. So if they are not donating their money, let’s encourage them to devote some of their time.
An ageing population means that the very notion of retirement needs to be reconsidered. Raising the retirement age is one approach. A national service could be a more palatable alternative.
