PRIME Initiative

Click to download PRIME briefing paper as PDF 295K

ABSTRACT This paper summarises the ways in which the recession has impacted on the older (50+) workforce, comparing ONS data for different age cohorts since August 2008 – the point where the UK was entering recession and marked differences in the impact on these age cohorts started to appear. The data is drawn from ONS Labour Market Statistical Bulletins from October 2008 to February 2010, which provides figures from August 2008 to January 2010.

Plans to deal with pension shortfalls by encouraging people to work for longer received a dash of cold water today. Three-quarters of us could be too ill to work, Professor Sir Michael Marmot of University College London warns in a new report.

All but the richest Britons suffer years of ill health. People in the richest neighbourhoods in England live seven years longer than in the poorest, and enjoy an extra 17 years of good health.

Even if you exclude the poorest five per cent and the richest five per cent the gap in life expectancy between those in low and high income places is still six years, and in disability-free life expectancy 13 years.

Much more needs to be done to address health inequalities if raising the retirement age to 68 is really to mean people remaining active and working for longer, the report warns.

The report is not the work of some maverick outfit, but the final paper from the Marmot Commission - set up in 2008 at the request of the Secretary of State for Health. The Commission, chaired by Sir Michael Marmot, was tasked with finding the most effective strategies to reducing health inequalities in the country.

Fair Society, Healthy Lives (The Marmot Review)

Coverage at Times Online

In all the events and reports on worklessness that have come out over the last couple of weeks youth unemployment is always the central theme. But the evidence on youth unemployment is a bit like jelly - bright and brash on the surface, but 95 per cent water. You can’t use it to support anything. Only Polly Toynbee writing in the Guardian seems to have noticed that there was considerably more youth unemployment in the 80s than there is now.

Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying we should take all the public and private money that is spent on youth schemes away. The two groups that suffer the most when unemployment rises are the young trying to get a start on the employment ladder and older workers trying to stay on it – or get back on. Both groups require help - it’s not an either or thing.

The belief that all our problems will be solved if we throw everything into helping youth is irrational. It doesn’t even help youth long term. If older workers can’t get a job who will be paying to support them in their impoverished retirement? Today’s youth, one way or another.

In fact the interests of young and old are closer than you might think in other ways too. For example, schemes to help them often have the same flaws. So understanding what actually works when it comes to practically assisting one group can often lead to better initiatives to help the other.

Take the Future Jobs Fund. It is a Department for Work and Pensions initiative designed to create 170,000 additional jobs, mainly for 18-24 year olds who have been out of work for nearly a year. It does seem to be providing some new opportunities, particularly in work experience and training places. But it’s too early to say how many of real long-term jobs will remain when the money runs out in March 2011.

Here’s the problem. The Future Jobs Fund depends on there being employers ready to take government money to create sustainable jobs for youth. But will there be enough employers wanting to hire in the midst of a recession? Even with the incentive currently being offered of up to £6,500 for each unemployed young ­person taken on?

We really need to increase the number of expanding employers. One way to do that would be to put more effort into enterprise support for people creating new businesses. For example the over 50s – people who have seen recessions before. People with the experience, skills and knowledge to build businesses with a good survival rate, even in tough times.

So let’s put aside the false distinctions and the factional fighting. It’s often older people who can help younger people. And the other way round too.

Having said that, I’d not say no to a Future Enterprise Fund for the over 50s, should some wise government set one up. The point is the jobs the new enterprises create would help not just their older owners, but all of society.

Influential voices are calling for the current “default retirement age” of 65 to be scrapped. The latest call comes from the Equality and Human Rights Commission (EHRC), which has said that workers should be able to stay in their jobs beyond the age of 65. The EHRC polled 1,500 workers, and found that a relaxation of the current rule would be welcomed by most. The House of Lords is likely to debate the issue today, as part of the debate on the Equality Bill, which is currently threading its way through parliament.

Currently employers have the legal right to force employees to retire at 65 - irrespective of whether or not the employee in question is still able to do the job. This was confirmed in a legal ruling in September of last year - but there were strings attached.

The High Court ruled that the default retirement age was not unlawful - but that there was now a compelling case for it to be scrapped. In practice this means that employers can still lawfully retire people against their will at the age of 65, for the time being. But the court wanted an urgent review of this provision.

The current Equality Bill does provide an opportunity to decide whether the default retirement age stays in place. The government has said it intends to get the bill passed before the general election this year. So there’s a chance here for the political parties to do more than make promises, but to actually vote on the issue.

Many organisations have already scrapped automatic retirement based on age, without waiting for a change in the law making them. They include Tesco, Marks & Spencer, HBOS, the Co-op Group and the Civil Service (for all but senior civil servants). An umbrella group called The Employers Forum on Age has been campaigning against forced retirement at 65 for several years.

However, Personnel Today magazine, which itself backs the campaign to scrap forced retirement, reports that some employers are still against changing the law, particularly now, in the middle of a recession. This is because it provides a useful mechanism for them to reduce staff numbers legally. Personnel Today quotes one HR director, who is against changing the lw, as saying “It’s useful to us now”.

Long term though forced retirement at 65 is likely to go. But this in itself won’t be enough to keep more people in work and earning. The jobs need to be there in the first place, for anyone of any age to do.

External links
Equality and Human Rights Commission summary of proposals

EHRC report (PDF) Working Better: The over 50s, the new work generation

Personnel Today on attitudes of HR chiefs pro and con

The Guardian Harman wants end to compulsory retirement age

Note:
The default retirement age and the state pension age are currently out of step. The default retirement age was set at 65 for both men and women in legislation that came into effect four years ago. Meanwhile women continue to be receive their state pension earlier than men, currently at age 60 while men have to wait till 65. But the plan is to harmonise the age for both sexes, increasing it in stages to 68 over time.

When will you get a state pension? Official State Pension Age calculator

Just before the Christmas break the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) launched its latest White Paper Building Britain’s Recovery - Achieving Full Employment. Straight after the break we have The Prince’s Trust YouGov Youth Index 2010 survey. This includes the claim, which is already well-established in the popular mind, that young people are hit hardest by the recession. It also forecasts that there is going to be a lost generation of youth.

The White Paper more positive - it is full of aspiration and is optimistic about the possibilities. The aspiration is for an 80 per cent employment rate - and hats off to that. There are plenty of well trailed policy initiatives in here for youth in the labour market, alongside some gently understated statistical reminders that the 16 to 25 unemployment data has been overblown. 

But for me the most under-rated possibilities are around the over 50s might achieve with a bit more backing.

Curiously the White Paper did not give a statistical analysis of the change in 50+ unemployment between this current recession and the last one back in the 90s. But it did give one for the 16 to 25 age group.

If the both older and younger age groups had been compared a contrast in their experience would have stood out. Things are better this time around for the 16 to 25 cohort, but worse in unemployment terms for those over 50.

There is a recognition in the White Paper that the over 50s are facing age discrimination. It also recognises that self-employment for those over 50 is very important for the labour market, and Jobcentre Plus needs to respond to this.

Pre-empting the launch of the White Paper by a month, every Jobcentre Plus in England and Scotland started displaying PRIME leaflets on 50+ self-employment and enterprise. And the response has been huge.

My New Year’s wish for 2010 is that our society will realise that a workless future is just as depressing for a 50 year old as for a twenty year old. The feeling of being rejected by society does not lesson with age; if anything it becomes since the prospect of your plight being recognised and any help arriving is worse.

Let us pray that White Papers are like white Christmases: that they make dreams become reality.

Here’s a short fascinating research study by the Kauffman Foundation, which funds many education and entrepreneurship programmes in the United States. It’s fascinating not least because US trends often end up happening here eventually.

According to the Foundation’s research it’s people in the 55 – 64 age group who are now responsible for the highest rate of entrepreneurial activity in the US. More surprisingly, the research also found that there were twice as many founders of technology companies over the age of 50 as under the age of 25. So even in hi-tech startups its the oldsters who are making the pace.

It is as if, the report mischievously points out, “Entrepreneurship is the New Mid-Life Crisis”.

So who is supporting and training these older entrepreneurs in the US? They are missing a direct equivalent of PRIME, which has always argued that we need to invest more here in providing free support, help and advice for potential entrepreneurs and especially for olderpreneurs.

But they do have a famously entrepreneurial culture and a more forgiving attitude to business failure, which may encourage more people to take a risk. The US also has one of the world’s longest-established and largest business mentoring programmes in the form of SCORE (originally the Service Corps of Retired Executives), and a government-funded business support service (the Small Business Administration) that goes right back to President Dwight D. Eisenhower in the 1950s.

Like Ike and the US Congress at the time we believe that an investment in encouraging small businesses is quickly recouped as new businesses are established. It seems to us that the value added and return on investment in supporting enterprise is far greater than the returns on investing in employability.

And yet here in the UK we spend much more on employability schemes than on enterprise support, and vastly more on employability schemes for the over 50s into than on supporting older entrepreneurship.

But attitudes may at last be changing in the UK. SFEDI (the Small Firms Enterprise Development Initiative) has long been an advocate of free universal enterprise support, but now it is being joined by an association of small business trade associations working together under the Genesis Initiative.

If we invested more in free universal enterprise support, we might not immediately overtake the United States when it comes to having a thriving small-business culture. But we’d certainly speed up the economic recovery.

Here we go again. George Osborne has announced plans at the Conservative Party conference to make us all keep working longer before we can draw our State Pensions. While this might a seem logical way to save public money it misses the same key point as most similar proposals to raise pension age. It assumes there are going to be jobs there for these older workers to do. In reality it is probable that almost half will be out of work.

So for many people it will simply mean moving from drawing their pension to drawing an out-of-work benefit. Where’s the saving in that?

Let’s be clear. I have no problem with the idea of working for a bit longer. In fact there’s a lot of positive things to be said for it. It would probably lead to a generally better standard of health, and many people would a welcome a chance to stay ‘connected’ and contribute to society for longer. And of course, there’s the financial benefits.

But the tricky bit is finding the jobs. So, at the moment, George Osborne has only half a policy. The difficult bit is missing.

The fundamental point that George Osborne seems to have missed is that alongside the proposed changes to State Pension Age, interventions are required to help older workers to stay in, or get back into, work – and these interventions come at a cost.

According to the last census, economic activity rates for workers during the five years immediately before retirement were only 58% for women, and 52% for men – and these figures are likely to have been worsened by the recession.

So what we really need from the Conservatives are some really innovative proposals that give older workers real support in finding sustainable work opportunities. Given the poor track record most companies have in hiring older workers, these proposals will have to include self-employment. This is how currently how over a third (35%) of 65 year-olds choose to work (source: ONS 2001 Census).

Full text of George Osborne’s speech

Over 300 delegates from older people’s organisations poured into the Scottish Parliament at the bottom of The Royal Mile in Edinburgh on Friday 2nd October. This was the first Older People’s Assembly in Scotland of this size, and is certainly more than England, Wales and Northern Ireland have produced. There are a range of forums, panels, committees and local assemblies across the UK, but nothing on this scale or with this potential.

A few years ago the obsession was with younger people’s parliaments. Thank goodness the reality of an ageing society has at last sunk home.

For me it was a great pleasure both to be able to speak about the work PRIME could deliver to help the Scottish Government create a wealthier and fairer Scotland, and to actually enjoy being in the ten-year-old Scottish Parliament building.

Like many first assemblies in the past, the sub-texts of this very successful meeting were about the legitimate areas of discussion, the format that any future meetings of this kind should take to be most effective, and what the extent and limits of the Assembly’s power might be.

At this stage the proceedings of the Assembly will form a report which will go to, amongst others, the Members of the Scottish Parliament. But there then has to be a deliberation about the next steps.

Younger people’s assemblies are a chance for the young to learn political skills, but older people’s assemblies may well offer a chance for older people to apply the political skills they have learnt over a lifetime. I was certainly urging the Assembly to demand a proper programme of enterprise support activities for older people in Scotland.

If society continues to be so youth obsessed, will older people take their political revenge through older people’s assemblies? It will be interesting to watch, but even better to participate.
Further reading:
Report on event from Age Concern and Help the Aged in Scotland

Here in the Northwest we’ve compiled our own ageing framework – Everybody’s Future – A Northwest Regional Framework for Ageing. Within the framework, a number of priorities are highlighted. It calls for better support for over 50s enterprise and working together with our partners and stakeholders we’ve pushing towards a target of 80% employment for people aged 50 to 65.

In September I published the second issue of Prime in the Northwest – Stakeholder Newsletter. It’s features include an interview with Yvonne Sampson - Strategy Manager (Culture) in the Enterprise & Skills Directorate, here at the Northwest Development Agency. She talks about PRIME’s involvement with the regional Enterprise Forum and the importance of 50+ Ambassadors for Enterprise. There’s also a profile of Jill Molyneux talking about her work on the ground over in Doncaster.

PRIME and the NWDA are gearing up towards Enterprise Week in November – organizing events and activities to raise the profile of Over 50’s enterprise across the region. We’re looking for 50+ Ambassadors to demonstrate to others the benefits and opportunities self employment for over 50’s can offer.

If you or your clients would like to be involved in the NW Ambassador campaign or work with us during Enterprise Week, please get in touch with me, Heather Radley at PRIME in the NWDA and sign up today. We’ll actively raise your profile in the media and it’s an opportunity for you to help others realize the freedom self-employment can give.

Nationally the Government released ‘Building a Society for All Ages Strategy‘ back in July. One of its central objectives is to improve employment prospects for older people. This report highlights the value of self-employment - and PRIME itself is mentioned as playing an intrinsic role in delivering enterprise support for over 50s.

I still have people saying to me that the over 50s are risk averse. And so - the implication often is, that we should not bother with providing enterprise support for them.

Up to now my answer has had to be two-fold.

Firstly, if we use the word “prudent” in place of risk-averse, we get a whole new perspective on older people’s attitude to entrepreneurship. Prudence genuinely is something that often comes with age. Prudence is prior experience and learning applied to a situation - with prudence you calculate risk rather than just pursue it. If our youthful bankers had been a bit more prudent rather than “risk-perverse” we would all be a lot better off now.

Secondly this argument that the over 50s are risk averse is a very sweeping generalisation, and like other such generalisations looks less and less plausible the more you examine it. Are you really telling me that at the age of 50 a risk gene is triggered in all humans that turns them into gibbering wrecks hiding in the corner in mortal terror? There are so many people in the UK aged over 50 but still below state pension age (over nine million and growing) that you would expect to find a broad range of character traits among them. They may not be very dissimilar to the population at large.

But these arguments have never stopped those fond of the risk-averse argument advancing it as if it were established truth.

Now a report from NESTA provides some robust research evidence to back what PRIME has been arguing from the practical experience of helping over 3,000 over 50s a year. Olderpreneurs are no more and no less risk averse than their peers. In fact 50 to state-pension age people make up 22.4 per cent of the economically active workforce but are providing 27 per cent of the successful start-ups, according to this research.

It is a great pity the research is not published in hardback. Then I could use it to thwack the next person who tells me the over 50s are risk-averse.

Download:
NESTA’s third age entrepreneurs report (PDF)

“The grey economy - how third age entrepreneurs
are contributing to growth”, by Ron Botham and Andrew Graves. A research report published by NESTA.

Abstract from NESTA site

The population is getting older, with many more people aged 50 and over. Their economic contribution is also increasing. More people are working beyond statutory retirement age. And more of them are running their own businesses.

At the same time, particularly during a time of recession, the government has a strong interest in encouraging more people to become self-employed or set up their own company.

Particularly where such companies create work for others, they can make a valuable contribution to the recovery.

This week has seen a rash of media stories saying that youth unemployment is running out of control, in reaction to the official labour market statistics released in August.

But the real story contained in the Office for National Statistics latest figures was rather different.

Though both groups have a hard time in a recession, oldsters who drop off the employment ladder are having a harder time even than the youngsters taking their first steps onto it.  It is this story - about the difficulty that older have finding work, that is rarely told.

Just how could they get it all so wrong? Well, read PRIME’s Occasional Paper on the subject.

Too many commentators appear to have rushed in and grabbed the first figure they could find, so anxious were they to “expose” a huge rise in youth unemployment. They all made the elementary error of assuming that those who were economically inactive were all unemployed and completely forgot that nearly one million people aged 18 - 24 are in full-time education.

The real story in these statistics is the same one that PRIME published in 2004 when PRIME wrote “Towards a 50+ enterprise culture” based on the 2003 labour market statistics.

It’s the over 50s stupid.

Why are the media writing wrong headlines and getting the interpretation of the data so wrong? The statistics do tell a fairly clear story that we have a huge worklessness issue among the over 50s. It’s not that hard to discover what is really going on.

When the data is adjusted for full-time education amongst the 16/17 year olds and the 18 - 24 year olds, it is quite apparent that these cohorts are faring betting than others. That is not to say that everything is rosy - one person in ten aged 18 - 24 economically inactive is not good news. But compare it with worklessness in the 50 to State Pension Age cohort. One in four is economically inactive in this age group according to these data.

How about a call for programmes for the 50+ workless? How about a call for more help for 50+ self-employment and enterprise?

Some voices are now calling for such action.  The TUC has just warned that long-term unemployed people aged over 50 are at risk of never working again - unless they get proper tailored support to get back into the job market.

The TUC quotes research that shows that people aged over 50 who are unemployed are 10 times more likely to still be out of work after two years than they are to have found a new job.

For a man in this age group, says the TUC, for every additional year spent unemployed the chances of never working again increase by almost 25 per cent. Almost half of unemployed people over 50 had been out of work for more than a year.

It’s not an optimistic story. But it is the truth. We won’t get far doing much about tackling unemployment if the majority of the media get the facts wrong. It takes the pressure off the authorities to get help to the people suffering the worst.

PRIME Occasional Paper August 2009 on Older Workers And Recession

PRIME OccPapAug09 Appendix 1 Labour Market Data Unadjusted

PRIME OccPapAug09 Appendix 2 Labour Market Data Adjusted By Education

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.

Eight per cent of UK adults now want to start a business in retirement, according to a YouGov poll commissioned by Standard Life. And 85 per cent do not intend to stop work after they reach retirement age.

YouGov surveyed the opinions of 2,100 adults broadly representative of the UK population. A third (33 per cent) of respondents wanted to continue in full-time work after they reach retirement age. Roughly another third (31 per cent) wanted to carry on in a similar role but on their own more flexible terms. While eight per cent wanted to start their own business.

Commenting on the findings, John Lawson from Standard Life said “Quite simply, people do not get old like they used to. The baby boomers started a trend for redefining what is effectively their ‘third age’ and these findings point to a continued trend for re-writing the rule book for younger generations.”

The full report is not yet available at the time of writing but it should appear on the Standard Life site shortly.

See also Baby boomers don’t want to retire says pension firm.

Over the next 20 years the UK’s population will age faster than ever before in its history. There will be 5.4 million more people of pension age - an increase of 45 per cent. At the same time, our working-age ratio is declining. This combination has serious implications for the economy, with proportionally fewer workers supporting the growing number of older retired people.

One measure being implemented by Government from next year to tackle this issue is the introduction of later retirement ages. Through gradual changes in State Pension age (SPA), three million people who would otherwise be able to claim a state pension are being nudged rather hopefully back into the workforce.

This presentation given by PRIME recently (Powerpoint format) highlights the economic impact of these changes - and projects even higher levels of worklessness and poverty among older people if practical measures are not adopted now.

Of the three million workers eventually being removed from pension entitlement by the changes, most are women - in fact in the initial batch all are. We reckon that no more than 40 per cent of the total are likely to be economically active. This means that 60 per cent of the three million will be without a pension - and without a job. And that’s without taking into consideration the impact of the recession, since it’s impossible to say how long that will last.

But it does seem the consequences of changing the pension age haven’t really been thought through. In attempting to solve the problem of financing pension provision the state may only have succeeded in creating different problems elsewhere.

On the plus side, today around one fifth of the over-50 working population are self-employed, and many continuing to work beyond the current state pension age. So there is considerable benefit to the economy to be gained through assisting higher numbers of over 50s into self-employment.

But self-employment isn’t an option for everyone, so there would also need to be other measures to support older workers to remain in or re-enter conventional employment.

Without such action raising the state pension age won’t accomplish much - indeed it may do more harm than good. It’s not enough to put a whole lot of older women and men back into the workforce by administrative fiat. They also need some practical way of making a living.

See also What are the alternatives to a personal pension? on our other site.

Barbie has joined the ranks of the 50-plus, an event celebrated in characteristic style with an immediate facelift. Plastic surgeons at Californian-based manufacturer Mattel have given the world’s most famous doll “a more natural look, including a thinner jaw line, more almond-shaped eyes and fuller lips”.

It is notoriously difficult to judge people’s ages nowadays, as by and large people are looking much younger than their parents did at the same age. This doesn’t seem to prevent the all-too-common tendency by employers and some advertisers to lump all over 50s together as a single group, putting Baby Boomers and their elderly parents in the same category (often the same scrapheap). The mistake is to ignore the real differences in age, attitudes and ability to work between distinct generations.

In tune with today’s celebrity climate, let’s attempt to correct this by identifying some famous people born in the main years of the post-war boom. There are some surprises!

Selected Baby Boom celebrities by year of birth

1945: Ken Livingstone, Helen Mirren, Debbie Harry, Bryan Ferry, Rod Stewart - all 64 this year.

1946: Joanna Lumley, Susan Sarandon, Alan Rickman, Sylvester Stallone, Bill Clinton - all 63 this year.

1947: Alan Sugar, David Bowie, Iggy Pop, Hillary Clinton, Salman Rushdie, Glenn Close, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Elton John - all 62 this year.

1948: Prince Charles, Ozzy Osbourne, Samuel L. Jackson, Sven Goran Eriksson, Terry Pratchett - all 61 this year.

1949: Twiggy, Bill Nighy, Richard Gere, Duncan Bannatyne, Arsene Wenger, Martin Amis - all 60 this year.

1950: Richard Branson, Jeremy Paxman, Julie Walters, Bill Murray, Stevie Wonder, Robbie Coltrane - all 59 this year.

1951: Gordon Brown, Kevin Keegan, Michael Keaton, Jane Seymour, Sting all 58 this year.

1952: Vladimir Putin, Jenny Agutter, Sharon Osbourne, Liam Neeson -
all 57 this year.

1953: Tony Blair, Victoria Wood, Kim Basinger, Pierce Brosnan, Keith Allen, William Petersen - all 56 this year.

1954: Bob Geldof, Michael Moore, Annie Lennox, John Travolta, Jackie Chan - all 55 this year.

1955: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Bruce Willis, Kevin Costner, Ian Botham, Alan Hansen, Lesley Garrett - all 54 this year.

1956: Rowan Atkinson, Kim Cattrall, Mel Gibson, Martina Navratilova, Sebastian Coe - all 53 this year.

1957: Stephen Fry, Paul Merton, Daniel Day-Lewis, Dawn French, Donny Osmond - all 52 this year.

1958: Madonna, Prince, Sharon Stone, Michael Jackson, Kate Bush, Lennie Henry, Viggo Mortensen, Marg Helgenberger, Miranda Richardson - all 51 this year.

1959: Hugh Laurie, Theo Paphitis, Deborah Meaden, Ben Elton, Morrissey, Linzi Drew, John McEnroe, Kevin Spacey, Val Kilmer, Rupert Everett - all 50 this year.

1960: Nigella Lawson, Kristin Scott Thomas, Carol Vorderman, Hugh Grant, Sean Penn, Gary Lineker, Colin Firth, Antonio Banderas, Michael Stipe, Bono, Richard Farleigh - all 49 this year.

1961: Barack Obama, Barry McGuigan, Eddie Murphy, K D Lang, Meg Ryan, Nastassja Kinski, Boy George, Frank Bruno, George Clooney, Heather Locklear, Michael J Fox, Peter Jackson, Robert Carlyle, Sarah Brightman, Tim Roth, William Hague, Woody Harrelson - all 48 this year.

Perhaps even more suprising are some of those born in 1969, who will all be 40 this year - Catherine Zeta-Jones, Jennifer Aniston and Jennifer Lopez.

Worth a read: Advice for Barbie at age 50