Factlet about the over 50s in employment

Yesterday the FT reported that the number of people aged 50-plus with jobs has risen by 1.7 m to 7.64m since 1997. The biggest percentage rise of any age group. If you are interested, click here to read the document upon which the article was based.

Some 400,000 of these extra employees have chosen to work beyond the current state pension ages, taking the employment rate for pensioners to a record 10.9 per cent.

Great headline but you need to dig a bit deeper to understand what is really happening.
According to TAEN about 800,000 of the 1.3m rise since 1997 in employment of people aged between 50 and pension age was simply a "function of the post-war baby-boom generation arriving at 50 plus".

Before the mid-1970s, the employment rate for men aged between 50 and 65 was running at well over 80 per cent. The loss of many traditional manual jobs, as manufacturers closed unprofitable operations and restructured businesses, reduced this to 64 per cent by summer 1993. It has now recovered to 72.3 per cent.

My fear is that these numbers are distorted by the over-50s who are counted as being self-employed (I think the figure is around 20%). There is true ‘self employment’ and the use of the term for somebody who doesn’t want to be seen as unemployed but for all intensive purposes is. Dick Stroud