Loretta Platts introduces the WHERL project to the European Commission

On 12th January Dr. Loretta Platts introduced the WHERL project to staff at the European Commission’s Directorate-General for Employment, Social Affairs and Inclusion. This meeting extended the project’s network to policy makers at EU level and will help us interact more effectively with European institutions in the future. We’ve put edited highlights of the presentation Loretta gave in Brussels online, to provide a bite-size introduction to the WHERL project.

Although our research programme uses data from the United Kingdom, countries across the European Union are facing similar policy challenges of ageing populations and how to effectively and fairly increase pension ages. For its part, the European Commission has a long-standing interest in helping its member states design more sustainable and equitable pension systems, and to improve the European job market for older workers. This means that there is a natural match between the European Commission’s and our objectives of understanding who remains in work up to and beyond the state pension age and what the implications are for people’s health and wellbeing if they participate in paid work in later life.

As we start to address these issues, our scientific findings will be converted into policy briefs, which will be helpful for a wide range of policy actors in the UK and, hopefully, policy-makers at the EU level as well.