UK ‘barking up wrong tree’ trying to get over-50s back to work

The question they should be asking is: why are people here with 10+ years experience not worth more than a recent grad?

I just transitioned to a Principal Architect role so I find this comment to be kind of hilarious.

From my personal anecdotal experience the ageism in tech may be better described as generationalism. It appears that companies don't mind hiring "older" people, but that there's a generational gap that companies are less likely to cross. As time moves on that generational gap also ages up.

According to the article, it's about people who stopped working due to health issues.

> rather than be paid to little to be the ablative armour of a system stretched to breaking

Love that imagery. Although I work for a tech consulting firm rather than having a real/useful job like those you describe, I would apply the same sentiment. The difference is that while public services are being worn away at an accelerated rate due to a lack of maintenance, tech is like The Bus That Couldn't Slow Down - hurtling along with bits (and people) flying off in all directions, desperate to avoid going below that critical speed.

For many NHS workers there is even a stronger incentive not to work at least not for the NHS.

The UK has a life time pension allowance once you reach it there is a huge tax penalty.

NHS workers have a defined benefit scheme on which you can easily reach the LTA within a few decades especially as a doctor.

Once you do that you are stuck with a massive tax penalty that makes it utterly pointless to work because your take home can be literal pennies as the tax liability after reaching the LTA is 60% which in a DB pension would be added to your annual tax bill unlike a defined contribution pension which will simply be raided by the HMRC when you retire.

Also previously HMRC has raided pension funds firstly by introducing the LTA then by shrinking it the LTA now is circa £1.2M the LTA of those who retired a decade ago it was £2.5M…

So if you can afford to retire early you also are incentivized to do so because it locks down your pension and secures it from any future raids by the government.

I can’t stress how terrible and backwards the tax system in the UK is.

It forces a tiny minority to pay for most of the tax burden whilst providing them for absolutely no benefits in return since nearly every benefit in the UK is means tested and the bastards know how to pay the least so they conveniently chose which benefits are means tested based on the highest earner in each household.

So if your partner works whelp no unemployment or housing benefit for your most likely… someone in your household earns over £50K? Well no child allowance…

At £100K you also lose 30 hours of free childcare per week and tax free childcare I known people that took a pay cut and turned down bonus payments because those benefits can easily be worth £20-30K of salary at 40% marginal tax rate in London.

Old people read the Mail and Express, not Murdoch media.

The problem in the UK is less that everything is expensive, but that nearly everyone is poor. Inequality really appears to be going rapidly the wrong way.

isn't that what liz truss tried and got fired over? not convinced more neo-liberalism is the answer.

It's the economical equivalent of "beer got me into this mess, so it can damn well get me out of it"

In a speech to a room of over 50s the quantity of early retired person is near enough to 0.

Messaging that the kidz and the early retired (aka someone else) need to do their bit for the country will make the 99% of people in the audience that are employed and working hard feel like the true patriots trying to save the country from the forces of evil that they are.

I've heard their pension system penalizes older doctors with more taxes once they accumulate enough years so its better to retire at that point.

The other thing is junior doctors can't progress forward in their training and career as there is limited training slots for specialization. So they end up logjammed being in the low rung doing scutwork at little pay.

Also doctors pay has not kept up with inflation for the last decade. Right now what they really want is full pay restoration but the government isn't budging.

There is a Reddit subreddit where UK jr doctors chat about this stuff and its very enlightening.

What if the healthcare system is mostly serving people too old or sick to work?

I disagree, there is building everywhere you look on the main train lines into London. But the population needs to stabilise, and even then it would still take a while to catch up.

British population is up by just under 10 million this century, that's a lot of new houses, and population density in houses is falling - its a far cry from the working class slum conditions of the 19th century, even in London these days.

But now, finally, the disbenefits of rampant house price inflation are starting to be shared by everyone, rather than by only those locked out of the leverage-fueled bonanza. The huge cohort of winners have done so well out of it that it is now actually creating a labour shortage as described, outweighing the "wealth effect" which was supposedly so beneficial to the economy throughout the boom. So now maybe The Government and The Bank will not be quite so inclined to keep pumping it up any more.

The Truss era polling put them forth, after both the SNP and the LibDems; since then their polling has been upgraded from "existential crisis" to "disastrous".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Opinion_polling_for_the_next_U...

Edit: 4th by seats, not by percentage of the votes, given FPTP.