Sienna West, Senior Journalist for The British Wire

For decades, automation was a spectre haunting the young: robots stealing entry-level jobs from fresh-faced graduates. But the reality on the ground in Britain is different. The automation wave now is being propelled not by a surplus of young workers, but by a shortage of older ones.

Look at the numbers. The Office for National Statistics reports that over 10 million people in the UK are aged 65 and over. By 2050, this will rise to nearly 16 million. Meanwhile, the working-age population (16-64) is shrinking in relative terms. The dependency ratio is climbing. Fewer people pay taxes, more need care.

But the immediate pressure point is labour supply. In sectors like manufacturing, logistics, and agriculture, employers cannot find enough workers. Brexit tightened the tap on European labour. The pandemic spurred early retirements. Hundreds of thousands of over-50s left the workforce and have not returned. The so-called ‘economically inactive’ among them has surged.

I spoke to Dr. Alistair Finch, an economist at the Resolution Foundation. “Companies are reacting to a genuine scarcity of human hands,” he said. “They are not replacing young workers with machines. They are replacing jobs that older workers have left. And because younger cohorts are smaller, there is no one to fill the gap.”

Take the warehouse sector. Ocado, the online grocer, has long been a poster child for automation. But its new fulfilment centres are not about efficiency alone. “We cannot find pickers,” a logistics manager told me on condition of anonymity. “The local labour pool is over-60s who do not want to do this work. So we have to build a robot solution.”

Adoption of automation in Britain has been comparatively slow. For years, UK firms lagged behind Germany, Japan, and South Korea in robots per worker. But that is changing. Investment in robotics and AI systems by UK businesses hit a record £3.6 billion in 2023, according to the International Federation of Robotics.

The demographics are making the decision easier. The cost of a warehouse robot has fallen sharply. Meanwhile, wages for manual roles have risen. The national living wage hit £11.44 an hour in April 2024. In some sectors, that has accelerated the business case for automation.

But there is a darker side. Older workers who lose their jobs to automation find it harder to retrain. The government’s ‘Fuller Working Lives’ strategy, designed to keep over-50s in work, has had mixed results. Age discrimination remains rife. A 2023 study by the Centre for Ageing Better found that a third of employers admit to age bias in hiring.

And what of productivity? The UK’s stubborn productivity gap has been linked to underinvestment in automation. But if older workers are displaced and cannot find new roles, the social cost could outweigh the economic benefit.

During a visit to a factory in Sheffield, I saw robots stacking boxes once handled by men in their late 50s. The plant manager said, “They retired or left because we couldn't pay them enough. Now we have fewer people, but we produce more. That is the reality.”

But it is not just heavy industry. In financial services, Aviva and Lloyds have cut thousands of roles while investing in AI-driven processes. The average age of their employees has risen. The younger victims of past automation are now mid-career professionals facing a new wave.

The trade unions are alert to this. At the TUC Congress 2024, a resolution was passed calling for a ‘just transition’ for older workers in automated workplaces. Frances O'Grady, then general secretary, said, “We cannot let automation become a polite word for pushing older people out of work.”

The government’s response has been piecemeal. There is a £100 million ‘Get Britain Working’ fund, but it is not ring-fenced for older workers. The apprenticeship levy remains skewed towards young people. There is no national retraining scheme for over-50s displaced by robots.

Yet the demographic tide is not going to turn. The baby boomer generation is aging out. The workers who replaced them at the start of their careers are now the ones being replaced by machines. The cycle is moving faster.

Some see a solution in a four-day week or more flexible working. But automation does not care about flexibility. It cares about numbers. And the numbers are stark: by 2030, one in four people in the UK will be over 65. The working-age population will have shrunk by another 500,000.

Does this mean a future where robots serve the elderly? Possibly. But the immediate impact is here, now, in factories and call centres and warehouses across the country. The old jobs are not coming back. The new ones require skills that those leaving the workforce often do not have.

I asked Dr. Finch what keeps him up at night. “The pension system is already under strain,” he said. “If we automate people out of work before they are ready to retire, we create a generation of older poor. That is a political and social time bomb.”

The UK has a choice: automate thoughtfully, with retraining and support, or let market forces drive a wedge through the workforce. The clock is ticking. And the demographic shift waits for no one.