PRIME Initiative

How facts are reported often affects how people respond to them. So the changes made this month by the Office of National Statistics in how it reports age in its main labour market figures is a welcome development.

The most important change in the newly released August 2010 ONS labour market statistical bulletin relates to the way women are treated. Previously men and women over 50 were treated differently, with separate male 50-to-64 and female 50-to-59 female reporting categories.  Women over 60 were considered as having retired from the labour market.

Now both men and women are reported in the same age bands, making direct comparison between the genders much easier. ONS will be doing this with historic data too, all the way back to 1971. For now though the most immediate side efect is to boost the 50-to-64 workless figures, since woman over 60 can now be included.

Source: AgeUK, based on ONS Labour Market figures

This change is entirely legitimate.  It just recognises the reality of modern life: many women aged 60-to-64 need to earn a living.

Not only is the state pension they receive (from the age of 60 at the moment but rising in steps from next year to 65 by 2020) reduced if they had taken time out to look after a family, but family life no longer guarantees financial security in the way it was once asumed to do. Many older women nowadays find themselves suddenly on their own after the break up of a relationship. Divorce in its many modern forms still often leads to poverty, for one or both of the participants, just like it always has.

Going back to the newly released ONS figures, what can they tell us? The big picture is that there are now 3,605,000 people, men and women, aged 50-to-64 who are workless. That is over 32 per cent, or fractionally below one in three.

Long term unemployment amongst the over 50s is rising. Amongst the registered unemployed some six per cent of the over 50s have been out of work for over two years, whereas the figure for the under 50s is half that at three per cent.

The number of over 50s that have been out of work for over six months and claiming Jobseekers Allowance has risen by over 22,000 in the last twelve months.

This is borne out by PRIME’s experience. Nearly 20 per cent of the people who contact us for help have been workless for over two years.

So what needs to be done?

Here are five suggestions.

Top five ways of tackling older unemployment

1. Reduce the delay in getting older people onto back-to-work programmes. Jobcentre Plus still seems to operate a six-month rule for the over 50s. This means they won’t put you on New Deal programmes until you’ve been waiting on benefit for six months. The delay is bad for everyone, but is particularly damaging for those wishing to work their way off benefit by setting up a new business, since that’s going to take quite a while anyway.

2. Waive tuition fees for the sort of vocational courses that would enable workless older people to get back into work through self-employment. The state really is the only player capabe of having a positive impact here. Banks are very reluctant to lend to older people who need the money for a vocational course, or indeed any course. But you’re not going to be able to work as a locksmith, caterer or gas fitter without the qualificatons.

3. Get rid of poverty traps in the welfare system. Housing benefit is a particular problem for anyone thinking of starting a business, since it hard to find out when exactly the money will stop if you start working. People need to know when their business needs to be earning enough to replace the benefits they have coming in. Not knowing is a major disincentive to starting. If we want to encourage entrepreneurial behaviour ideally people need to know that if the worst happens and their business fails they can at least go back to the same level of welfare support they are on now.

4. Keep funding business support for new start-ups in the UK. The over-50s are an entrepreneurial group, but most of those who find themselves out of work haven’t been entrepreneurs all their lives. They need basic help, including business mentoring in the early stages and free business health checks in the first couple of years of trading.

5. Improve the visibility of existing help for out-of-work adults - and in particular those wishing to work their way off benefits. People who have been working all their lives don’t know all about the benefits system and often find it depressing. They will inevitably get to learn about Jobcentre Plus, but their chances of hearing about about other sources of free or low-cost practical help for self-employment (often sponsored by local councils) is much less.

So these are PRIME’s suggestions.  All five could all be wrapped up in a New Enterprise Fund for the over 50s, since they do reflect many of the government’s stated aspirations for a “Work for Yourself”  programme.

Hopefully the arrival of a new government on the scene representing not one but two political parties will mean a new openess to good ideas.

But what’s a bit depressng about the list above is that so many of the ideas closely echo recommendations we made back in 2004 in PRIME’s report “Towards a 50+ Enterprise Culture“.

PRIME does its bit on point 5 above with our online support directory, which lists of sources of reputable practical help around the UK that we know about. But considering it is often tax payers’ money that is ultimately paying for many of these schemes it’s surprising there’s no centrally maintained up-to-date list the public can refer to.

I was asked to be an “expert” on a BBC Radio Scotland call-in programme on pensions and retirement. I was there to talk about finding an income by starting your own business. I suspect there was a feeling that starting your own business was a way of the retired developing a satisfying life style, but the very articulate callers made it clear that poor pensions, despite a lifetime of payments, was a major gripe.

My fellow expert, Dan Hyde, the pensions reporter on www.thisismoney.co.uk, found himself, against his better judgement, defending the pensions industry. My other co-expert, Frances Fay (www.francesfay.co.uk), author of the Good Retirement Guide found herself under attack with the familiar line “It’s alright for you”. I was luckier thanks to a jaunty octogenarian who had created his own business driving trucks around and was clearly loving it.

But just when you leave the bus-stop three buses going to your destination pass you by. Immediately after the programme three pieces of research on pensions self-presented on my computer screen.
The first was reported in the Mature Times. Retirement specialist Partnership reported that 77 per cent of all the annuities they dealt with were for pension pots of around £30,000. This would buy £40 per week to top up the state pension of £97.65 (assuming you were entitled to it all – many women now in the 50s are not). This is roughly a quarter of the UK average male and female wage of £500 per week. No wonder the callers to BBC Radio Scotland complained!

But then came Ernst & Young’s report for the 2020 Public Service Trust at the RSA entitled “The Deficit: A longer Term View” http://www.2020publicservicestrust.org/publications/
Basically they were saying that an ageing population along with the cost of climate change and three other public expenditure drivers would ensure that the UK had an unsustainable budget deficit. If I understood the argument, the cost of state pensions and welfare for an ageing population, alongside the other public expenditure drivers, would mean that the UK had to borrow more and more from the money markets because we would not be able to meet the budget deficit from higher taxes or public expenditure cuts. The message is that unless we start to make difficult choices, “we’re doomed”.

Then up pops a message from the International Longevity Centre with a research review on the future of retirement (http://www.ilcuk.org.uk/). The review reported on a survey of 280 people aged 50 – 69, finding that of those above SPA (state pension age) and still working, one in three was self-employed. However only 56 per cent of the self-employed had a pension compared to 72 per cent of those who had been or were employees. What is clear is that the self-employed retire much later. This accords with PRIME’s own anecdotal evidence.
What do we make of all this? Well in my view the chances of improved pensions over the next decade or so are just about zilch. If anything there will be continued pressure to keep the state pension as low as possible. Just raising the retirement age is not going to help – already almost one person in three between the ages of 50 and SPA is workless. Pretending people are able to work longer is a self-delusion.

As a nation we need to change our view of older people and their contribution to the labour market. If we want to help older people to continue to be active in the labour market, increase individual and national wealth and reduce the cost of an ageing population, we just have to invest in self-employment support for older people.

This is the question that is raised in an economic analysis of the ageing of society in the UK and in a far ranging discussion paper. Both are published by BIS (Department for Business Innovation and Skills) on its mini-website www.bis.gov.uk/ageingpopulation.

You can find the relevant discussion paper here (as a PDF download) and the analysis can be found here.

PRIME would like to highlight three things:

(i) The Discussion Paper invites your input by the 30th June 2010. This is your opportunity to say what you think is important.

(ii) For the first time a paper published by the government states that almost one person in three between the ages of fifty and state pension age is currently out of work. This needs to be emblazoned from the tree-tops to counter some of the knee-jerk media response to unemployment statistics.

(iii) Self-employment for the over 50s is featured as an important labour market response. Olderpreneurship is not seen as a rather quirky side issue, but an important part of the future economy.

(iv) Wow. Someone has been listening.

The manifest season is upon us. And the last few weeks seems to have been alive with enterprise manifestos. None of them from a political party - but all of them about enterprise.

Here are some examples.

The Genesis Senate - Britain’s Economic Revival through micro, small and and medium-sized businesses

SFEDI (The Small Firms Enterprise Development Initiative) - Making self employment and micro enterprise a viable income opportunity for all

NFEA (National Federation of Enterprise Agencies) - Enterprise, the Economy and Society

And there are more.

What they all have in common is a view that enterprise will be critical to coming out of the recession, and start-up support, advice and mentoring should be available to a far wider range of people than is currently the case. They all want to see enterprise as an equal and integral part of Welfare to Work and better advertising of enterprise opportunities in Jobcentre Plus. And they all want to see finance to start a business available to a wider range of people.

Well, PRIME has been pre-empting the enterprise manifestos.

We now have a PRIME 50+ self-employment flyer in every Jobcentre Plus in England and Scotland, and now over one third of our enquiries are from people reading about PRIME and self-employment in Jobcentre Plus.

We have a sub-contract or agreement with a major contractor in every Flexible New Deal area in England and Scotland under the first phase and we have been working hard to ensure we are in every area in the second phase. We are currently awaiting the announcement on the second phase major contractors. This means for the over 50s, self-employment and enterprise will be a key option in Welfare the Work.

We recently launched our mentoring scheme for people just starting out on their enterprise journey in Bristol, Newcastle and Belfast. We have worked closely with Her Majesty’s Revenue and Customs to train volunteer mentors and they are available now. We will be adding new areas as we roll out the scheme across the country.

And yes, we have the PRIME-Zopa olderpreneur loan scheme.

All the parties are busy telling us how they will get people back into employment and off the dole queue. They have to realise that creating the jobs comes first, and that means putting enterprise first. Without a growth in new businesses, and therefore in new jobs, the best laid welfare to work plans are doomed to failure. So the issues raised in the enterprise manifestos need to be given pride of place in each political party manifesto.

I wonder if they will.

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.

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.

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

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.

PRIME’s £2 million corporate partnership with Bank of America has received a great deal of publicity in the last few days. And quite right too. Bank of America is the first major corporation to stand up and say “We believe in the potential of people aged over 50: we are going to invest in PRIME so that the entrepreneurial spirit of older people can be realised”.

We anticipate that Bank of America will be the first of many corporates to get it -  that in an ageing society olderpreneurship is vital for global competitiveness.

But what are we spending the money on?

First of all we are appointing two mentor coordinators, one in the South and one in the North, to recruit, train and manage volunteer mentors. Many of our clients want a mentor who can help them make that jump from thinking whether self-employment is something they can do, to getting their business underway. Having someone to turn to at that time is something PRIME’s clients have really appreciated where we have been able to offer a mentoring service.

Then we are appointing two trainers. We want to provide a range of introductory road shows across the country as well as more detailed workshops. At the end of November we ran a beginners roadshow in Belfast and some more detailed seminars and we were able to help over 130 people. How marvellous if we could emulate that in 20 more cities in the UK in 2009!

Bank of America is putting £0.5 million into our new Prince of Wales Enterprise Endowment. We are looking to see this grow as other corporates and individuals donate to the fund. The Enterprise Endowment will eventually provide a range of financial help to olderpreneurs. We intend to start with a micro-loan scheme for those who cannot raise money from traditional banks. This will be launched around Easter 2009. In the meanwhile we are appointing a loans officer to put everything in place.

STOP PRESS. The Zopa-PRIME Olderpreneur Loan scheme is now available - more details on our client-support site.

Hectic but exciting times. PRIME is making progress - but offers of help are always welcome. Please see SUPPORT US.

When Enterprise Week was first invented a few years back PRIME was vociferous in pointing out that enterprise was not just for the young. Finally our lobbying paid off. In March 2008 “Enterprise: unlocking the UK’s talent“, the government’s new strategy on enterprise appeared. In it there was a small paragraph with major ramifications:

“Given the ageing population and the lower aspirations around enterprise amongst older age groups, it is important for the UK’s future growth prospects to encourage more people over 50 to become enterprising. The Government will work with Enterprise Insight, PRIME and SEEDA to develop and a campaign to encourage older people to realise the benefits of unlocking their talent and exploiting their skills and knowledge to be active in enterprise”.

So this year a number of special events designed for the over 50s will feature during Enterprise Week. Some of these are highlighted on www.primebusinessclub.com under “Up-coming events”.

Enterprise Insight has commissioned research on the thorny question of marketing enterprise to the over 50s. You might think that marketeers would have cracked this long ago - but they were too busy concentrating on the youth market!

It has been a very small start, but it is a beginning. There is a slow dawning of realisation that soon there will be more people over fifty than under fifty. The number of young people is dropping fast. Ignoring the needs of those aged over fifty is becoming a nonsense.

Why?

Well first of all nearly one person in three aged between fifty and state pension age is workless. These are people who have one-third of their lives in front of them. They need to finance this.

If we are to have a robust and competitive economy, we need a thriving start-up market. Given that the number of younger people is falling (and the under 30s start-up market was never that strong anyway), we need to invest in people with skills and experience if we are, as a country, to remain competitive in the global economy.

The sad thing is that too many people just have not got it yet.

Let us make sure that this year Enterprise Week is also Breakthrough Week for olderpreneurs.

The Prince of Wales is 60 on the 14th of November 2008. PRIME itself was born around ten years ago, as a direct result of the approach of the Prince’s 50th birthday. He realised that for most people getting a job gets increasingly difficult with age. His post bag was full of letters from people desperate to work but unable to find anyone to employ them - because they were “too old”. PRIME and its sister charity in Wales PRIME-Cymru were the result - two of the 18 charities the Prince has personally founded.

The two PRIMEs help people over the age of 50 get round the problem of finding someone to employ them by setting up in business for themselves - self-employment as a means of getting back into the fray and earning a livelihood.

In addition to his charities, Prince Charles has also founded six social enterprises whose trading activities help fund them. The best known is the highly successful organic brand Duchy Originals, the most recent The Highgrove Shop. These activities are substantial - the charities alone raise over £100 million a year from all sources.

It would tempting to apply an American term like “social entrepreneur” to the Prince. But this would fail to do justice to the real roots of his commitment. This side of the Prince’s life gets well-deserved attention in an hour-and-a-half long BBC documentary two day’s before his 60th birthday.

“Charles At 60: the Passionate Prince” transmits at 8.30pm on BBC One on the 12th of November. The BBC has had unprecedented access over the course of a year to observe the Prince at work in the UK and abroad, at home at Clarence House in London, at Highgrove in Gloucestershire and Birkhall in Aberdeenshire.

“This important documentary sheds new light on the Prince of Wales”, says Nick Vaughan-Barratt, its Executive Producer. “It shows the Prince using his substantial influence to further a wide variety of causes – some of them unfashionable, some controversial – and it provides a rare opportunity to hear him speaking directly, not just about what he does but why he is so passionate about the many causes he espouses.”

UPDATE: Missed the programme?
Watch on BBC iPlayer.

More about the programme at the BBC web site

Full list of Prince’s charities and social enterprises