Mary Berry, and now Prue Leith. Retiring in your 80s is the new 60s |
So Prue Leith is standing down from The Great British Bake Off. She has done nine years and feels it to be “the right time to step back” and “spend summers enjoying my garden”. Her fans and her friends will be sorry to see her go and will wish her well. The only thing they might question is her throwaway justification, “I’m 86, for goodness sake.”
What has that to do with it? Ever since the Equality Act of 2010, various discriminations in employment have been illegal. They included those based on ethnicity, gender, faith and age.
After the 2010 act, the state pension age was planned to rise to 67, meaning that more older people are staying in the workforce. Those aged over 65 and recorded as “economically active” surged from around 900,000 to 1.5 million in a decade. Still just 12% of over-65s were at work in 2023, but the idea of Britons becoming useless at 60 was increasingly unreal. With a declining birth rate and a shortage of experienced........