Today, the Academy of Social Sciences in conjunction with the British Society of Gerontology and Age UK, will be launching a booklet* highlighting a number of issues our society will face as a result of the increasingly ageing population in the UK and other nations. The Office of National Statistics (ONS) predicts that in twenty years there will be more than 15 million people over 65 – that’s 23% of the population. Rises among the ‘oldest old’ are even greater: in 1984 there were around 660,000 people in the UK aged 85 or older, by 2009 that had risen to 1.4 million, and is expected to rise to 3.5 million by 2034.
Issues such as the rising costs of social care and early onset dementia are, and will increasingly become, some of the most significant social challenges of our time. In the Foresight project on Mental Capital and Wellbeing**, it was predicted that as life expectancy increases the number of people living with dementia will double to 1.4 million by 2038, with associated costs trebling from their current rate of £17b to over £50b.
There are a number of questions surrounding this emerging social phenomenon which remain to be answered. For example, how do we prevent cognitive decline in the elderly? How long should people work for (given the pension crisis and the changing age of retirement)? How do we deal with social care of an ageing population? How do we support those that care for elderly and sick relatives? These are real and pressing concerns that we literally cannot afford to ignore and we have little time left to plan and prepare for how to deal with these issues.
That said, I think we can do it – we have a new government that is focusing like never before on cost and efficiency savings in society and the economy alike – this will include managing the cost of social care. If you add to that the work of the institutions mentioned above who will continue raising awareness, stimulating debate and identifying innovative solutions then I think we have a chance of getting a grip of this difficult social challenge.
*Making the Case for the Social Sciences, No. 2 AGEING, London: Academy of Social Sciences.
**Cooper, CL, Field, J., Goswami, U., Jenkins, R & Sahakian, B (2009). Mental Capital and Wellbeing. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
