Introduction
There has rightly been growing interest in the make-up of the UK workforce in recent years and this has focused on the new requirement to publish a Gender Pay Gap report. For more information you can read McCarthy Stone’s Gender Pay Gap report.
We want to go further and have committed to publishing data on the age of our workforce and to encouraging equal opportunities and inclusive treatment across all age groups.
In line with our purpose of championing the needs of older people, we want to empower all employees to feel recognised and valued in the later stages of their careers and help re-set perceptions of those in later life as ‘past their prime’. Across society and business in general, the loss of older workers is a ‘brain drain’ as they hold many years of experience and have significant knowledge, not least in mentoring the next generation of employees.
The following outlines the current makeup of our workforce by age.
The age of our workforce
- The average age of our employees is 46.5.
- The most common age range of our employees is between 51-55.
- 43% of our workforce is aged 50 or over.
- 12% of our workforce is aged 60 or over.
Doing more in future
While we already have a large proportion of our workforce aged 50 or over, we feel there is still more we can do.
Age equality forms part of our Equality, Diversity and Inclusion activity and we are going to be looking at introducing new education, training and action in this area to ensure equality of opportunity across all age groups.
We will update this page with more information in due course as we progress these activities.
Our Vision for Later Life in Britain report, published in May 2021, also called on government to make it a requirement for all businesses to publish a regular ‘Age Gap’ report. It also called on government to introduce a new ‘Kick Start’ scheme for older generations – incentivising businesses to hire more older people and be rewarded for doing so (just as they are for hiring 18-25 year olds).
We will be pushing these recommendations with government, and you can read our Vision report here.