Martin Gilbert calls on City to champion older workers
Asset management veteran Martin Gilbert has called on City firms to champion older workers amid a slide in the amount of over-55s working in UK.
Gilbert, the Chair of asset manager AssetCo and fintech giant Revolut, said that age needed to be included as a more serious factor in firms’ diversity and inclusion reporting, alongside measures like gender and sexuality.
“There has been much progress made in terms of diversity — albeit there is still room for improvement,” he wrote in Financial News.
“The mistake some businesses make is to focus only on gender rather than also, for example, ethnicity, sexuality and social background. Instead, the focus should be on inclusivity in the broadest sense, including factors such as age.”
His comments come amid a plunge in the amount of older workers in the UK, with over-50s making up around 493,000 of a total 522,000 people who were deemed to have become economically inactive in Q4 last year, according to figures from the Office for National Statistics.
Gilbert further warned of a potential wave of retirees looking to reenter the workforce after rushing to use up their pension pots in 2015, following changes to pension rules. If this happens, those workers should be “welcomed back with open arms” he said.
“The loss of experienced and skilled workers is not helpful to the fortunes of companies and economies,” he added.