Young people will suffer the most from the failure of successive governments to focus on the financial and social challenges caused by an aging population, a House of Lords report has found.
They will need to plan and prepare to work longer and save more, starting at a much younger age, the economic affairs committee said.
The report also said the adult social care crisis “remains a scandal” that urgently needs to be addressed.
Committee chairman Lord Wood of Enfield told the BBC it had been a “struggle to find where in government” attention was paid to aging and the “transformative effects” it would have on people.
“Aging is something we just observe,” he told BBC Radio 4's Today programme, adding: “We know that adaptation is the way forward.”
The report says the policies governments have used to address Britain's falling fertility and rising life expectancy (such as raising the retirement age or increasing immigration) have not been an adequate solution in themselves.
Getting more people aged 50 to 60 to stay in or return to work “is key” and the government must prioritize incentives to do so, the committee said.
It also says an aging population will need more care workers, leaving other parts of the economy with fewer workers.
He said there was “widespread ignorance” about how much retirement costs and the government should consider an education campaign, as well as whether the UK's financial services sector is capable of supporting the population as it ages.
Lord Wood said the government and financial services industry must develop “more innovative ways of getting young people to think about lives that they frankly cannot imagine at the moment – in their eighties and early nineties”.
“They have a long way to go in terms of financial planning, whereas we know that younger people are doing less financial planning,” he added.
“Raising the state pension age, which saves public money but increases pensioner poverty as many people are already out of work by age sixty, is a red herring.
“To successfully confront this challenge, we need to change the way we manage the finances of today's and tomorrow's youth.”
