Forget getting early retirees back into work, what about those in their 30s? - David Behrens

Truthfully, midlife for me came and went some time ago. But while I’m objectively no longer middle-aged I’m also not old, not by today’s standards. And age is relative anyway: apparently you can now be past it at 30 if you didn’t pay attention at school.

That wasn’t what you’d have wanted to hear on Thursday if you’d been a 16-year-old picking up your GCSE results. But there it was in black and white, in a report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies: thirtysomethings without academic qualifications were more likely to be invalided out of the workplace than graduates twice their age.

Fully a quarter of those aged 30 who had left school with nothing to show for it were now suffering from conditions that made them unable to hold down a job, said the researchers. A quarter? That must make them average. Welcome to the club.

People used to work until they dropped, as the medic who took the blood sample from my thumb observed. In his job he was used to seeing men with fingers like Palethorpes sausages, riven by years of graft in a factory or a farm and he surmised, correctly, that I’d never done a hard day’s work in my life. The only damage to my fingers was from getting them stuck between the keys of a typewriter.

But times have changed and so has the bar for holding down a job. This week’s figures took into account psychological as well as physical problems and concluded that people without qualifications were more likely to have poor mental health and therefore to be unemployed.

The report should be seen in context: the Institute for Fiscal Studies traditionally takes quite a narrow view of these things and has been accused in the past of offering up ideology masquerading as science. Nevertheless, it’s hard to ignore its calculation that if the number of unqualified young people being referred to NHS mental health services continues to grow at its current level, the employment gap between those who went to college and those who didn’t will rise exponentially.

If ever there was an inequity that demands political attention, this is it. Yet, with the honourable exception of the campaigning Manchester mayor Andy Burnham, no-one appears to be doing anything about it.

What we have instead is a government initiative – if that’s not a contradiction in terms – to lure back into the workplace people in their 50s who retired during the pandemic, by offering them apprenticeships to learn something new.

It’s a commitment that doesn’t stand serious scrutiny. Even the education minister, Nick Gibb, admitted this week that these “returnships”, unveiled in the “back to work budget”, amount to little more than links on a website, pointing older workers in the direction of schemes that were designed for people a third their age as an alternative to university.

So that’s the plan to entice 55-year-olds back to work: treat them like underachieving teenagers.

How is that going to work? Can you honestly imagine ex-office staff mucking in with school leavers who think a filing cabinet is something you have in a nail salon? What possible incentive is there in being made to feel that your years of experience count for nothing? On the snakes and ladders board of life, it’s like being sent back to square one.

The government says it has “no data” for the number of people who have taken up its offer. I think we can safely assume that means no-one.

It’s a scheme that betrays the hollowness of ministerial thinking in general. Returnships, levelling-up, the Northern Powerhouse… they’re all back-of-a-fag-packet slogans without an ounce of substance between them.

Besides, the policy of targeting early retirees is short-sighted. It’s not they who hold the key to rebalancing the employment market; it’s younger workers who barely entered it in the first place. They have potentially 30 years of service left in them.

And it’s not as if there are no jobs out there; at the last count there were 1.1m vacancies – not necessarily where they’re needed but vacancies nonetheless. This time next year there will be 650 more. Apply Westminster, SW1.

In a country as socially mobile as ours we ought to be able to do a better job of spreading the work around. Because if we can’t, they’ll be doing midlife MoTs on the next generation at 35.