26/10/2026
There’s something about Britain’s retirement system that I’ve been thinking about recently, and the more I’ve looked into it, the more I’ve wondered whether we’re having the wrong bloody conversation.
We’re constantly being told that people are living longer, so naturally, we’re going to have to work longer. On paper, I can understand the argument. People are collecting their pensions for longer, the population is ageing, and somebody has to work out how the country is going to afford it all.
But there’s one rather inconvenient detail that seems to get overlooked whenever retirement ages are discussed.
Not everybody earns their living sitting behind a desk.
I’ve spent a considerable part of my working life doing physically demanding jobs. I’ve worked in plastering, industrial roofing, cleaning, and eventually spent years running my own cleaning business. I’ve been up ridiculously early, worked long days and done jobs where you’re absolutely knackered before you’ve even thought about going home.
And anyone who’s spent years working in the trades will understand something that doesn’t always appear in a government report.
Your body remembers the work.
The years spent lifting, bending, kneeling, climbing, carrying equipment and putting physical strain on yourself don’t simply disappear because you’ve finished paying the mortgage or celebrated another birthday.
Now, I’m not suggesting everyone who’s worked in construction is falling apart by 60. I’ve known blokes older than me who could probably still outwork people half their age. Equally, plenty of office workers develop serious health problems.
But surely we can acknowledge that spending 40 years working on building sites is physically different from spending 40 years in an office?
And surely that difference deserves some consideration when we’re discussing how long people should be expected to keep working.
Because here’s where things get interesting.
The UK State Pension age has already started increasing from 66 to 67. The change began in April 2026 and will be completed by April 2028. Under current legislation, another increase to 68 is scheduled between 2044 and 2046.
That’s the timetable.
But here’s what bothers me about it.
According to the Office for National Statistics, healthy life expectancy in the UK for 2022–2024 was just 60.7 years for men and 60.9 years for women.
Now, that doesn’t mean everybody suddenly becomes ill on their 61st birthday. Healthy life expectancy is a statistical measure of how many years people can expect to spend in good general health, not a prediction of when they become incapable of working.
Nevertheless, when we’re talking about people potentially working until 67 or 68, it’s a statistic worth paying attention to.
And it gets more uncomfortable.
The Health and Safety Executive reported that approximately 511,000 workers in Great Britain were suffering from work-related musculoskeletal disorders in 2024–25.
We’re talking about conditions affecting people’s backs, joints, muscles and limbs. Construction workers and people in skilled trades were among the occupational groups reporting higher rates than average.
That’s hundreds of thousands of people experiencing the physical consequences of work, while the country continues discussing retirement largely in terms of birthdays and financial calculations.
But perhaps the most interesting figure I discovered came from a House of Commons Work and Pensions Committee report published in July 2026.
It found that 57% of people were no longer in paid work in the year before reaching State Pension age.
Think about that for a moment.
More than half weren’t working during that final year.
Now, some will have retired comfortably because they’ve saved enough money. Some will have private pensions. Some will have decided they’d simply had enough.
But others will have left because of poor health, disability, caring responsibilities or difficulty finding employment.
And that raises a question I don’t think we ask often enough.
What happens to somebody whose body has had enough of physical work at 61, but whose State Pension doesn’t arrive until 67?
What are they supposed to do for those six years?
Find another job? Fair enough, but what sort of job?
Imagine somebody who’s spent 40 years roofing, bricklaying or labouring. Perhaps their back has finally decided it’s had enough. Perhaps their knees are causing them problems. Perhaps they simply can’t manage the physical demands they once could.
We can tell them to retrain, and in some cases that will be a perfectly sensible solution.
But retrain to do what? Who’s employing them? How do they pay the bills while learning something new? And what happens if their health makes even less demanding work difficult?
These aren’t arguments against learning new skills. Far from it. They’re questions about whether the opportunities we’re telling people to pursue actually exist for everybody.
And for those who can’t continue working, there’s another uncomfortable reality.
The mortgage or rent doesn’t disappear because your back is knackered. Neither do the electricity bills, council tax or weekly shopping.
You still need somewhere to live. You still need to eat. And you still have years to get through before your State Pension becomes available.
Now, before somebody jumps into the comments, I’m not suggesting we simply reduce the pension age for everybody without considering how we’d pay for it.
That would be a lovely idea until somebody presented the bill.
There are genuine financial pressures involved in supporting an ageing population, and governments have to consider those pressures. We cannot pretend the money is unlimited or that every difficult decision has a painless alternative.
But acknowledging the financial problem doesn’t mean we should ignore the human one.
In fact, only two days ago, on 22 October, the Government’s response to that parliamentary investigation was published.
The committee had recommended looking at additional financial support for people unable to continue working before reaching State Pension age.
The Government acknowledged the difficulties but said a broader range of options needed consideration, particularly alongside its ongoing pension-age review. It also pointed to existing benefits and employment support.
In other words, the problem is recognised. The argument about what should be done remains unresolved.
And that’s where I think we need a more sensible national conversation.
Perhaps we should be discussing better support for older people who can no longer do physically demanding work. Perhaps employers should be offering more opportunities to move into less strenuous roles. Perhaps retraining should become a serious option much earlier in someone’s career, rather than something suggested when they’re already struggling.
And perhaps we need to stop treating retirement as though everybody arrives at it in roughly the same condition.
Because they don’t.
Someone who’s spent decades working at height, shifting heavy materials or cleaning buildings might arrive at 65 with completely different physical limitations from somebody who’s had a less demanding career.
That doesn’t make one person’s contribution more valuable than the other’s. It simply means their circumstances aren’t identical.
I’m not against people working longer if they’re healthy, willing and able. There are plenty of people who enjoy their jobs and have absolutely no intention of stopping at 67.
Good luck to them.
But there’s a considerable difference between choosing to work longer because you want to and being forced to carry on because you cannot afford to stop.
And perhaps that’s the distinction we should be concentrating on.
After spending years working with my hands, I’ve come to appreciate just how much we take our ability to earn a living for granted. We plan our finances around the assumption that we’ll keep doing what we’ve always done, sometimes without considering what happens if we physically can’t.
Of course, people should take responsibility for their financial futures wherever possible. Saving, planning and developing other skills can make a difference.
But personal responsibility has its limits, particularly when somebody has spent a lifetime working hard without ever earning enough to build substantial savings.
We shouldn’t dismiss their circumstances as poor planning any more than we should pretend the government can solve every financial problem.
There has to be some common sense somewhere in the middle.
Because retirement shouldn’t become a competition to see how much punishment somebody’s body can take before they’re finally allowed to stop.
And if we’re going to keep increasing the age at which people receive their State Pension, perhaps we ought to spend just as much time discussing what happens to the people who cannot physically make it that far.
After all, telling somebody they have to work until 67 is one thing. Making sure they’re actually capable of doing it is another entirely.
