Wise Owls Campaigns

Please find below a summary of our Audit of Public Sector Employers (particularly Local Authorities) by Age. 

We have made the league tables into these categories Under 25's, 25-49, 50+ because these categories best fit into the government's equality age categories.

League tables

League table - Under 25's

League table - 25-49

League table - 50+ including those over 65

Why use the Freedom of Information?

We were able to obtain this information using the Freedom of Information Act ( FOI). The reason we had to use the FOI act is that we were unable to get any support from the Prime Minister, the Minster responsible for Equality, the government, government departments, their equality quangos (like EHRC) or any Labour or Conservative MPs, to get them to carry out their own official audit of public sector employees by age.

While the government seems to be prepared to research other areas of equality in employment, as usual the situation of ageism and older workers (50+) is continually ignored, despite the ease and minimal cost of this research.
This may also be in part because the government does not want to examine the possibility that they, the public sector are in practice the most institutionally ageist employer of any sector.

This is despite the government’s own legislation relating to age, it’s lecturing other employers to stop being ageist and the key fact that an age diverse workforce has proved to be more effective, efficient and matches client age diversity.

We have listed the local authorities who have responded in a league table as to who is the most age diverse, who is employing the greater proportion of older (50+) staff and younger (under 25) staff. The listings start at the top going down to the worst ageist employers.

Please note however that the worst offenders are those who have not even had the courtesy to fulfil their legal FOI obligations and have not replied nor sent us the requested information. They were London borough councils: Kensington & Chelsea and Southwark. Not included in the league tables but still failed to return the stats are the House of Lords.

In addition some statistics were returned that didn't fit into these categories, some despite our request. What is clear is that all councils are keeping statistics on the age of their population, but their is no standard of category, which makes it impossible to keep a proper check. Some categories that are held make the statistics look better than they otherwise would taking a category from 50 to 60 for example. Because the majority of those employed fit between young and old this is misleading for the over 50's statisitcs. 

In order to compare the public sector employers’ age profile to that of the general age profile please note:

- The proportion of older people in work in the UK as in relation to the total number of people in work in the UK is

- The proportion of older people (50+) in relation to the total number of the working age population (16 – 65) is  

• Currently, 28 per cent of those aged 50 to State Pension Age are out of work, compared with just 20 per cent of those aged under 50. 

For full list of percentage breakdown please click here

We have written a Freedom of Information letter which is downloadable here. Download letter here

The statistics have been provided by the National Office of Statistics Labour market report here 

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Public sector organisations who have been contacted and have responded are set out below with their statistical response.

London Councils:

National County Councils

Public organisations: