Interviews on demographic challenges

CPC and CG members have recently given several interviews on some of the most pressing issues facing today's societies.

In September, Professor Jane Falkingham CBE, CPC-CG Director, took part in an episode of BBC News’ Talking Business.

During the episode, Professor Falkingham commented on a variety of themes, including life expectancy and the demographic transition. She said:

“It’s fantastic that life expectancy is rising across the globe. However, we’ve now got more people living into their 70s, 80s, 90s and even into their hundreds. But it’s falling birth rates causing societies to age. We have fewer people of working age to support more people of older ages, and this then presents a challenge in terms of how we take care of those older people, their health, their wellbeing at home, and their incomes.

“In the global north, the most expensive year for healthcare is the year immediately before you pass away, so a big thing is to introduce more preventative healthcare. Then, I think we need to have a proper debate around end-of-life, and end-of-life care. In the Netherlands, people can now decide to have an assisted suicide, and a good death. So a good life, followed by a good death.
“With pensions, there are several different angles, the first of which is the age at which people start to take their pensions. Many countries are looking at raising their age of retirement.

“We also need to consider who’s contributing to pensions. We’ve seen a massive labour market change over the last 30 years, particularly with women, and so an increasing female labour force. The third angle is that governments have, and businesses need to think about the structure of pensions – to what extent are they related to your salary in terms of defined benefit, or whether they are contributing pensions.”



Professor Falkingham also highlighted that workforces are becoming older in the global north, suggesting that employers should start to consider how they reskill their workforce, using lifelong training initiatives, and take into account the other demands that are placed on people as they get older, for example, caring for older parents, or for grandchildren to enable their children to participate in the labour market.

Connecting Generations Co-Director, Professor Melinda Mills, was interviewed for the Big Challenge series in Front Line Genomics in January, ahead of a talk she gave at the Festival of Genomics and Biodata in London about her work on genomics and shift work.

In the interview, Professor Mills discussed the big challenges in demography and population health, as well as her interdisciplinary research interests, and those of the research centres she leads at the University of Oxford: the Demographic Science Unit and the Leverhulme Centre for Demographic Science.

When asked about the big challenges in her research field, she commented: "Because my research is interdisciplinary, one of the challenges is to get many different perspectives, approaches, voices and techniques working together to answer the same question. We often have these ‘grand challenge’ questions, where we want to know how to solve an issue related to a disease, or how to solve an issue related to inequality in certain groups, things like that. One of the challenges is to make sure that the econometricians can talk to the geneticists, and the geneticists can talk to the geographers and so on. Getting all of these people speaking a language everyone can understand is important, because we’ve realised that a lot of the challenges that we have to deal with actually involve a lot of different perspectives, voices and approaches.

"I think another challenge is around data. This is something that I often encounter; I’ll get very good genomic or health data, but it won’t have very good non-health related personal, environmental or exposome data. Or the data about the individual isn’t great, for example, information about their socioeconomic circumstance, their household or their social network. It’s that special combination of all the different types of data that we need. It’s challenging because some of it exists, but it’s just not released. It takes some will for people to link different types of data together. It’s a regulatory issue. It’s a technical issue. It’s a willingness issue. It’s a commercial issue. It’s lots of different things. Even when I’m trying to link some data from different government departments, for example, it can be a political issue."

When asked about what can be done to solve such challenges, Professor Mills continued: "For some of the problems, there is a growth and understanding in the scientific world, in industry, and in government about trying to come together to think about how we can address these problems. How can we get different people in the room? That’s definitely happening, and we’re focusing on some really big, grand challenges. You can see that starting.

"What else should be done? I think there’s a long way to go for the other challenge that I mentioned about data. I think that governments and industry should start working better together. We have to change some regulatory situations; we have things like GDPR, which works towards making things more transparent and letting people understand how their data is being used. So, we have to think in terms of regulation, but also bringing the ethics and technical data experts into it as well.

"Generally, people are quite altruistic, and if their data is being used for a good cause, they won’t mind having it linked or being used in that way. We use a lot of whole population data from Scandinavia and from some other different countries where we can do things like that, and we’re able to solve big questions and look at entire populations. For me, that’s one of the more interesting things that I would like to look at – if we’re not doing it in our country, or our locality, then look at who else is doing it and ask why it isn’t a problem for them. Because I think there’s a lot of risk aversion as well."

Read the full interview in Front Line Genomics: The Big Challenge… With Melinda Mills.



CPC-CG member Dr David McCollum was interviewed by BBC Radio Scotland's Mornings show in November during a listener phone-in which asked: 'Net migration to the UK was a record 745,000 last year, where do you stand on migration?'.

In the interview, he explained that, historically, Scotland's migration problem has been people emigrating away from Scotland, rather than immigrating to Scotland, and that it's only in the last 15 years or so that Scotland has had net positive immigration. He commented: "In terms of attitude, it seems to be the case, according to opinion polls and other forms of study data, that attitudes to immigration in Scotland are less hostile than they are in many other parts of the UK. That's not to say there's not some hostility... so we have to be careful about giving the impression that Scotland is universally welcoming to outsiders when that evidently isn't the case, but it's perhaps less hostile than other parts of the UK."

Dr McCollum said that immigration geographies don't always correspond with levels of hostility: "In parts of Wales and Northeast England, they have less immigration than Scotland, but have some of the highest levels of hostility. Arguably, then, having more contact with immigrants could actually lead to less hostility as opposed to more."

Commenting that it is a far more complex issue than merely attributing strains on public services to higher immigration, he cited Scotland's ageing society and a need for the contributions of migrants to balance out the working-age demographic.

Read more on Dr McCollum's research: A place-based approach to population sustainability: Demographic and economic change at the local level in Fife, Scotland (Local Economy Policy Unit).

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CPC-CG member, Professor Nissa Finney, discussed the findings of the Evidence for Equality National Survey (EVENS) in episode 4 of the 'Race and ethnicity in Britain' podcast mini-series of the Centre on the Dynamics of Ethnicity (CoDE) Surviving Society podcast. EVENS is the largest and most comprehensive survey to document the lives of ethnic and religious minorities in Britain during the pandemic. In the episode, Professor Finney speaks about the motivation for and experiences of creating the survey.

Professor Finney said: "The power of being able to say, this is the general experience across the country, really can make people stop and listen. And if you say most ethnic minorities experience racism and have done so in the last year, in their neighbourhood, in jobs, in education, it really makes people stop and think because it brings it into clarity for audiences that don't often think about these kinds of questions and in ways that they can grasp. And that's the reason we wanted to do this survey; to make visible those experiences of ethnic and religious minorities that are often invisible, particularly through large-scale social data and evidence."

She also highlighted that the Covid-19 pandemic saw more political will to understand the ethnic inequalities that were becoming more prevalent, providing the opportunity to secure funding for such an ambitious project.

Thanking the 14,000 EVENS participants, and those who helped to promote the survey, Professor Finney said: "It's hopeful, that all these people saw value in creating new knowledge, creating this evidence, with the potential, with the power, to keep ethnic inequalities and racism on political agendas to provide new evidence and a whole new generation of debate about this... holding to account governments at all levels to engage seriously with anti-racist policies and politics."

Find out more about EVENS and use the data. On 23 February, Professor Finney is speaking at the event: Articulating and Categorising ethnic identity: Reflections on politics of recognition and (mis)representation in ‘Big Data’ using the EVENS Survey.

Posted 01/02/2024 11:02

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