Tick, tick, tick: the demographic time bomb

Even if demographic changes require people to retire later there's actually a lot of evidence to suggest that people are better off staying in employment rather than leaving the labour market." - —Dr Brendan Burchell The panel will address the economic implications of aging; how changes in the labour market will affect the workers of the future and the potential impact of the looming housing crisis. This talk is being held as part of Cambridge University's Festival of Ideas, the UK's biggest free festival celebrating the arts, humanities and social sciences. The panel, chaired by Chris Giles, Economics Editor of the Financial Times, will include the University's own Gemma Burgess, Senior Research Associate in the Department of Land Economy. She will be exploring the potentially unsustainable pressures of an ageing demographic who own £932 billion in equity in their homes, but who will in the coming years be relying ever more heavily on health and social care services. She said: "Without intervention, social care expenditure would need to increase more than threefold - 325 per cent - by 2041 to meet demographic pressures. We need to address these pressures to ensure that people enjoy a good quality of life in older age." Burgess will argue in support of findings made by the 2011 Dilnot Commission, which called for an increase in the means-tested threshold at which people are no longer entitled to subsidised care, as well as a cap on individuals' contributions to their own social care costs, which might encourage the release of some of the hundreds of billions of pounds tied up in equity.