However, some of the visions drawn up before this crisis seem to be long forgotten. Even Briggs’ former employer Aviva has abandoned its target to have 1,000 more over-50s by 2022, saying that interests have evolved to focus on diversity more broadly.
Stereotypes have barely changed. Age discrimination claims by older workers who lost their jobs rose by more than 70pc in 2020, figures showed last year. In December a judge ruled that asking employees when they plan to retire is age discrimination after the Ministry of Defence was sued by an official in his 60s.
Last week, a 75-year-old shop worker who had been at Asda for more than two decades won her age discrimination case against the supermarket after she said her manager made her feel as though she was “too old to be there” and asked about her retirement plans multiple times.
This was meant to be the year that plans set out by boards and ministers in 2017 to hire more over-50s bore fruit. Instead, concerns have deepened. This crisis has put older people more at risk and kept many shielding at home.
It has also ramped up the focus on technology, a sector that inevitably has a younger workforce. “Unlike Silicon Valley, we do not discriminate based on age,” a job post for a start-up read last year, underlining how hostile some sectors are for older workers looking for work.
The equality watchdog warned companies last summer that staff should not be “cast aside on scrap heaps” if they can’t keep up with tech. Richard Osman, whose bestselling novels centre around four elderly detectives in a retirement home, said last month that people over 70 have “disappeared” in British culture.
The last couple of years have seen some improvements. Many who were planning to retire or did so before the pandemic will have changed their minds now they can work from home.
Boards have turned their attention to the impact menopause can have on staff (almost 1m women are thought to have left the workplace due to menopausal symptoms). Timpson last year became the first UK company to pay for menopause prescriptions, while Asos and Citigroup said those going through menopause could take paid leave.
And after furlough support was removed last year, Rishi Sunak acknowledged the challenges facing older workers by saying that those aged between 50 and 64 who were no longer in work would get “more intensive, tailored support” to get them back into employment.
Yet more needs to be done. The share of employees aged 60 to 64 (5pc) and 65 and older (7pc) on furlough in September were both larger than the share of employees aged under 35 (3pc), according to the Resolution Foundation. Many will never have rejoined the workforce.
The Office for National Statistics found late last year that there were 180,000 fewer over-50s in work than before the pandemic. Last September, 362,000 over-50s were unemployed and 3.5m 50-64 year olds were economically inactive. At the same time the pandemic has increased loneliness and put companies on a desperate hunt for staff.
It is clear that the moment to revive plans for a more silver-haired workforce is now. The big promises made all those years ago, long before the dramas of this pandemic, must be fulfilled.
