PRIME Initiative

On Wednesday 24th June some forty people drawn from civil servants and government agency staff (from BIS, DWP, Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales), business support organisations and industry met together to look at harnessing the enterprise, experience and skills of the 50+ to the labour market. It was chaired by Luke Johnson, chair of the RSA, and facilitated by Tony Robinson of SFEDI.

To bring people from across the UK to such an event was itself an amazing step forward, but this was also the first rung of the ladder in a 50+ enterprise manifesto.

Let’s get some of the gripes over.

Between the ages of 50 and 65 almost one person in three is workless and almost sixty per cent have no pension other than the state pension to look forward to. People of this age who are out of work for more than six months after being made redundant stand a one in ten chance of ever working as an employee again. Despite this, there is still an inclination to say we should be concentrating on getting them jobs - stacking shelves or whatever. The unspoken implication is that this “enterprise and self-employment thing” is for the few and a bit of an irrelevance for mass 50+ unemployment.

On the other side there is an increasing number of people who are beginning to say that the opportunity for self-employment should be a right, and that implies the entitlement to an opportunity to gain the knowledge, skills and support needed to start a business.

Widening the 50+ enterprise opportunity entitlement is particularly important now that the government is making threats and promises about welfare and work to those aged under 25. Just how many jobs will there be left for the over 50s once this policy is fulfilled?

It seems to me that the economic case is undeniable. We cannot afford to keep a growing number of over 50s on welfare and pensions: forget tax cuts and paying off the cost of government borrowing. This is an escalating burden on the state coffers.

But what about industry? Someone said that the airbus creates tens of thousands of jobs but is dependent on 400 small and medium enterprises. Each of these “SMEs” is dependent on a large number of micro-businesses. Without these micro-businesses there would be no airbus.

But industry does not seem to be worried about the future of micro-businesses that are at the bottom of the supply-chain and are suffering most in the recession. You would think that with enlightened self-interest they would want to ensure there was a bigger pool of micro-businesses. They could easily do this by ensuring that all their experienced staff had an opportunity to think self-employment rather than think redundancy.

So, never was there a time riper for a 50+ enterprise manifesto than now.