Interactive Map: UK Population Age trends

The Office for National Statistics has released its latest dataset on UK population age trends. As usual, it is insightful and required reading - particularly for anyone involved in the running or administration of medium to large pension schemes where pensioner life expectancy is one of the specific concerns.

Interesting snippets include (from page 8):

It is projected that by 2033 the number of people aged 85 and over will rise to 3.3 million, or around five per cent of the population.
In 1981, approximately two-thirds of single person households consisted of people over state pension age, but by 2008 this had fallen to approximately half; this is partly a result of better survival of couples to old age.
By 2033, there will be about 2.8 people of working age to each person above SPA. Without the planned changes in SPA, this figure would have been projected to fall to around 2.2 people. It should of course be noted that not everyone chooses to retire at SPA.

See:

National Statistician's annual report on UK population statistics (ONS)

(3 pages)

Population Trends 138 (ONS)

(92 pages)

I’ve also attached a link to the ONS’s Interactive Map in the event that you’ve not seen this before. If you want to see something fascinating,
(1) select the drop-down menu to ‘Population aged state pension age and over’,
(2) move the ‘slide bar’ back to 1992 on the graph and then
(3) click the ‘play’ button.
See:

Interactive Map: The ageing of the United Kingdom 1992-2031, by Local Authority (ONS) and About the Interactive Map

What interested me about that was how relatively unaffected London and the Home Counties were by the increase in population age compared with large parts of the rest of the country. Who needs a Wii when you've got things like this to play with?