I have spent most of my working life moving between the NHS, local government and the voluntary sector, and the thing that has stayed with me is the distance between how policy describes people's lives and how those lives are actually lived. Nowhere is that gap clearer at the moment than in the way we talk about getting older.
Britain is living longer, and on most measures that is good news. More of us will reach our nineties and beyond than any generation before, and a child born in Hertfordshire today has a real chance of seeing the next century. Yet most of our places are still organised around a shorter, simpler pattern of life: education early, work in the middle, a shorter retirement, then later life managed mainly through services. That pattern no longer matches how people live, and we keep trying to stretch it rather than design something better.
We keep asking the wrong question
Most of the public conversation treats longer life as a problem to be absorbed. The mood is anxious and understandable. People worry about the cost of living, about whether there will be a GP appointment when they need one, about care for their parents, about housing their children cannot afford, about public services that feel thinner every year. Those worries are real. But the response, again and again, is to ask how we fund the pressures that arrive at the far end of a long life, rather than how we design the places where that long life is spent.
This matters because the pressures we notice late are usually made much earlier. Loneliness in someone's eighties has roots in streets that were never walkable, in bus routes that were cut, in a high street that lost its last café. The cost of care later is shaped by housing that traps people upstairs, by work that pushed them out at fifty-five, by years without anywhere ordinary to stay active and connected. By the time these things reach a service, the cheaper and kinder options have usually gone.
Ageing runs through everything
It also helps to be honest that ageing is not something that happens only to older people. A longer life is an intergenerational fact. The grandmother who can no longer drive changes the working week of a daughter in her forties. A shortage of suitable homes for downsizing keeps family houses off the market for younger buyers. People in their fifties and sixties may have decades of working and contributing still ahead of them. Employers are slowly realising that a workforce in its sixties and seventies is the ordinary future rather than an exception. And volunteers, who hold so much of local life together, are themselves ageing, caring and stretched.
So when I hear ageing described as a pressure on health and care, we are only looking at one corner of a much larger picture. A long life touches housing, work, learning, transport, public health, local enterprise, unpaid care, family life and digital access all at once. Treating it as a single service problem is part of why we keep falling short.
What a place built for a long life would do
This is why I have started to think less about services for older people and more about what I would call a 100-year neighbourhood: a place designed so that someone can grow up, work, raise a family, fall ill and recover, retrain, care for someone else, contribute, and grow old, all within reach of where they live.
It is a practical idea rather than a grand one. Housing is still built and allocated as though households stay the same, when in reality the same person may need room for children, then space to look after a parent, then a smaller home that does not cut them off from the people they know. Work is changing too, with more people staying in employment later, stepping out to care, and trying to return. Learning no longer stops at twenty-five, yet the chance to retrain or pick something up locally is patchy. Transport quietly decides how large or small a person's world becomes; when the route goes, so does the lunch club, the surgery and the part-time job. Unpaid care runs through all of it, with millions moving in and out of caring roles that rarely fit the way workplaces and timetables are arranged.
Around all of that sit the ordinary places that make somewhere worth staying in: libraries, arts venues, faith spaces, parks and somewhere to meet without having to spend money, local businesses that employ across the generations, and voluntary groups that offer a way in for a fifteen-year-old and an eighty-year-old alike. These should be treated as infrastructure, not as the first things to close when budgets tighten. Much of this already exists in fragments across Hertfordshire and elsewhere. The problem is that we plan, fund and judge these things separately, when the life they are meant to support is one continuous thing.
Where this sits with our work
This is close to the thinking behind our 2026–2030 strategy. We have set out to support strong local places where everyone can take part and make a difference, with priorities around the capability of voluntary and community groups, participation, creativity, wellbeing and belonging. Those words only matter if they shape how a place actually works. For an older person, belonging is often what keeps a situation from tipping into crisis. Participation gives a recently retired person a reason to stay well. The cultural and creative life of a place is frequently what makes people want to grow old there rather than move away.
I am not pretending the voluntary sector can carry this on its own, or that joining things up is easy. It is slow, and it asks organisations to share control in ways that do not come naturally. But the groups closest to where people live tend to understand the whole-life view instinctively, because they meet the same person at different stages and in different roles. That perspective is worth designing around.
A 100-year neighbourhood plan
So here is what I think we should be working towards by the end of the decade. By 2030, every local area should have a 100-year neighbourhood plan. I do not mean another strategy sitting on the shelf beside the housing plan, the health plan, the transport plan and the economic plan. I mean something that pulls those together around the reality of longer lives, and asks plainly what needs to change locally so that people can grow up, work, care, recover, learn, contribute and grow old in the same place.
That would mean councils, the NHS, care providers, housing associations, employers, colleges, transport, businesses, faith groups, charities and residents planning together with more honesty than we usually manage, and using what we already know about where people are ageing without support, where carers are under pressure, where transport cuts people off, and where local life is already strong. It would not solve everything. But it would move the conversation away from single-service pressure and towards the design of local life. We already make long-term plans for traffic and for housing growth. It is not a stretch to make one for a life.
We are going to live longer whether or not we prepare for it. The choice in front of us is whether those extra years are something our places are built to hold, or something services are left to manage after the fact. I know which one I would rather work towards, and I think most people, asked plainly, would say the same. Longer life is already here. The question is whether our neighbourhoods will be ready for it.
