Ageing Population Essay

The ageing population might be one of the most important issues of the UK and it is likely that the life expectancy of people will still increase in the next 30 years. The current situation is that there are two types of care for the elderly, one is health care and another is social care. Health care refers to the medical care for the elderly, while social care contains care homes and home care services. It means that the government should provide a long-term financial support to maintain both two types of care for the elderly. Nowadays, the NHS offers health care services for the elderly for free, meanwhile Netten and Curtis (2003) explain that there are three situations for the elderly to obtain social care. One is that the elderly who have savings below £14,000 can get free social care, the second one is that the elderly who have savings between £14,000 and £23,250 can get part-free social care and the last situation is that older people who have savings more than £23,250 should pay the total cost of social care. In addition, the Office for National Statistics (2015) reports that the median age of the population in Britain increased

“The proportion of the elderly aged 65 and over has increased by 47% from 1974 to 2014, while the number of the elderly takes up almost 18% of the total population in 2014 in the UK” (ONS, 2015), it means that the ageing population may change the age structure of the UK population and the number of retired people might increase. Because of this, the demand of labor force might be also on the rise .The shortage of the labor force might make it difficult for the government to support funding for caring the elderly, such as retirement pension, health care and social care. Furthermore, Christensen et al. (2009) considers that there are few young people to support the rapid growth of older people because of the increase of the life