The Retirement Age Trap – Why Young People Are Being Left Out of Work

It is becoming one of the great unspoken truths of modern Britain. The more the government raises the retirement age, the more it quietly blocks the next generation from ever getting a fair start in the workplace.

For years now, we have heard the same repeated line that people are living longer, healthier lives and therefore it is only reasonable that they should work longer too. It sounds sensible on the surface, but when you look closer it begins to seem less like sound planning and more like a policy that is slowly choking the natural rhythm of the labour market.

Every time the retirement age rises, thousands of older workers stay in their roles simply because they have no choice. The cost of living has risen sharply, savings do not stretch as they once did, and the state pension is not what it used to be. For many, the idea of a peaceful retirement in their early sixties has become a fantasy. It has been replaced by the reality of working well into their late sixties or seventies just to stay afloat.

That decision does not happen in isolation. When people cannot retire, the positions they hold do not become available. The teacher who might have retired makes way for no one. The office manager who would have stepped down stays on another five years. The bus driver, the factory worker, the administrator, all are part of a workforce that cannot move aside and so the next generation cannot move in.

We now have an entire layer of young people who are told there are plenty of jobs out there while being funnelled into temporary contracts, zero hours positions and unpaid internships, because the stable full time posts are already taken and staying taken.

The government loves to present this as experience retention, as if keeping older workers in post forever is somehow a masterstroke of efficiency. The truth is far less flattering. It is a policy driven by short term budgeting and political convenience, not by social balance. Instead of creating opportunity for young people, the government has built a system where one generation cannot afford to stop and another cannot afford to start.

The irony is striking. For decades, young people were told that education, training and ambition were the route to success, that if they worked hard they would get on. Many of those same young people are now stuck in a holding pattern, waiting for a ladder that never comes down.

It also breeds tension where there should be none. Older workers who have done their bit and deserve rest end up resented for simply staying in jobs they cannot afford to leave. Younger people, desperate for a chance, are branded lazy or unmotivated when they are really just trapped in a system that refuses to make room for them.

The problem is not laziness, and it is not entitlement. It is structural. A labour market can only breathe when there is movement, people entering, progressing, retiring and being replaced. Britain has frozen that cycle. The state keeps pushing the pension age higher, employers cling to experience over youth, and somewhere in between, aspiration is quietly dying out.

You cannot fix youth unemployment if you never create the vacancies that allow young people to start. You cannot preach about opportunity while locking the door to it.

If the government were serious about building a fair economy, it would recognise that work should lead to rest, not exhaustion. Retirement should be a right earned through contribution, not a privilege granted only to those who can afford it.

This is not nostalgia for the past. It is common sense. For generations, people worked hard, retired at a reasonable age and made way for others. That balance created a functioning economy and a sense of purpose for everyone. What we have now is neither fair nor sustainable.

It is time to stop pretending that keeping people in work until they drop is progress. It is not. It is the slow dismantling of the social contract that once made this country worth working for.