The Longevity Imperative at the Lords: Turning ageing from fiscal drag to national strategy

Britain should stop treating ageing as a looming liability and start treating longevity as a source of growth. That was the blunt message from London Business School professor Andrew J. Scott at a House of Lords event, The Longevity Imperative: Health, Productivity, and Prevention in an Ageing Society, held on 14 October, where he argued that prevention, skills and age‑friendly work are the fastest route to higher productivity and lower health pressures.

Hosted by Lord Jitesh Gadhia, an LBS alumnus (MSc, Management 2000), through the Oliver Wyman Forum, with additional hosting by Rupal Kantaria, Partner and Head of UK, Oliver Wyman Forum, the session was moderated by journalist Kamal Ahmed who paired Scott with GSK chair Sir Jonathan Symonds. The timing was deliberate: life expectancy revisions are edging upwards, the government is reviewing the State Pension Age, the NHS has a new ten‑year plan prioritising prevention, and heavyweight economic bodies, the OBR, OECD and IMF, have each flagged the GDP gains from healthier, more engaged ageing.

“Demography isn’t destiny,” Scott told the room, stressing that the real story is not the number of older people, but how we age, and whether systems nudge people to stay healthy, skilled and in work. He contrasted a “silver economy” stereotype, cruises and care homes, with an “evergreen economy” built to sustain healthspan and participation across the life course.

Scott’s case has two planks. First, behaviour and incentives change when lives get longer. The UK’s official statistics office expects about half of today’s newborns to reach their early nineties; for those already in their sixties, the chances of reaching eighty have risen from around forty per cent to roughly three‑quarters over recent decades. With more future years likely, individuals and institutions have to invest earlier and differently, in health, in skills, in finances. Second, the macro upside is material if the UK keeps people healthy and employed longer. Most job growth in advanced economies already comes from over‑fifties. Halving the fall‑off in work between fifty and sixty‑five, Scott argued, could be worth around four per cent of GDP a year, gains hard to find anywhere else in macroeconomics.

He was equally direct about the health system: “We’ve built a brilliant system for keeping us alive when we’re ill, but not for keeping us healthy.” Waiting lists are the wrong target, he said; policy should set measurable health outcomes and allocate resources to achieve them. That requires shifting from hospital‑centric, late‑stage care to prevention and early intervention, and tying health decisions more explicitly to economic outcomes.

Symonds, whose company is investing in vaccines and prevention, echoed the ROI case. The final decade of life, he noted, consumes a disproportionate share of healthcare costs, precisely the costs that can be reduced if risks are identified and addressed earlier. He pointed to the UK’s Our Future Health programme, aiming for five million participants, with roughly two and a half million already consented, as a unique national asset to test which prevention and early‑detection interventions actually work at scale and in the workforce. Internationally, he said, places such as the Gulf states show how digital infrastructure, genomics and proactive risk management can bend the cost curve while improving outcomes.

Politics, however, remains the sticking point. Lord Bethell, a former health minister, intervened to spell out the barriers: political campaign rhetoric fixates on inputs, more doctors, more hospitals, rather than health outcomes; producer interests are electorally pivotal; older voters dominate turnout; and the Treasury too often debates how much to spend rather than how to spend it. He called for a climate‑style reframing that makes prevention attractive and popular, suggesting the rapid uptake of GLP‑1 drugs is an early sign that voters will choose healthier ageing when offered credible options.

Scott agreed the current model is economically unsustainable and will ultimately have to change; the question is when and how. He urged policymakers and finance ministries to view health spending through a growth lens, distinguishing good investments from bad, and to connect health metrics to economic performance. With the OBR, OECD and IMF now quantifying the gains from healthy ageing, and the NHS formally elevating prevention, both he and Symonds argued the UK has a real chance to lead: world‑class data, science and research; a prevention‑first playbook; and a practical focus on keeping people healthy, skilled and productive for longer.

The upshot from the Lords: longevity is no longer a niche health debate. It’s an economic strategy hiding in plain sight, and one the UK can ill afford to ignore.

Andrew J. Scott is a leading voice on longevity economics and policy, shaping the healthspan‑productivity agenda as a London Business School professor and Director of Economics at the Ellison Institute of Technology, Oxford. He is the author of The Longevity Imperative and co‑author, with Professor Lynda Gratton, of the global bestseller The 100‑Year Life.