Peter Jackson column

Jun 15 2006 By Peter Jackson, The Journal

Business is trying to recruit older people, according to a new study. The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development, CIPD, has found that 70% of employers are actively looking to recruit people over the age of 55 and nearly a third of organisations want to take on those who already qualify for the state pension.

On the face of it, this is good news, given that none of us is getting any younger.

However, it may seem a little more worrying when you look at the reasons why businesses are so anxious to recruit the greying workforce.

The same CIPD report found that four out of five employers are having difficulty in recruiting staff and the main problem they encounter is a skills shortage.

Similarly, we are told that large scale immigration is necessary for the health of the British economy and, were it not for skilled East European workers, whole industries from plumbing to restaurants would grind to a halt.

And this is also borne out by the CIPD survey which says that 15% of employers are targeting migrant workers from the new East European EU states and that more than one in 10 is recruiting abroad to bring workers to the UK.

The worrying thing about all of this is that it seems to imply a writing off of a whole segment of our own indigenous population, which is unskilled, and which we despair of ever making skilled.

According to one report over the weekend, more than five million adults of working age are dependent on benefits and nearly half of those have been on welfare for more than five years.

The OECD has pointed out that in the UK we have proportionally double the numbers of pupils leaving school without qualifications as Germany and France. This is very worrying, given the current low standards of those UK qualifications.

It seems that as many as one in six British adults lacks the literacy skills of an 11-year-old.

This is in itself shocking, but more shocking is that doing something about it doesn't seem to be regarded as a national priority.

Little wonder that employers turn to the older section of the workforce, or Poland, given that the alternative is our own growing population of the unemployable.