Depictions of older people as hoarding wealth and working against the young are “ageist stereotypes”, a cross-party group of MPs has said.
The women and equalities committee writes that the “boomers” trope, referring to those born between the mid-1940s and mid-1960s, is a “significant contributory factor to the normalisation of ageist attitudes” in the UK.
A report from the group – entitled “The rights of older people” – says this age group are stereotyped as a group “who hoard wealth to the disadvantage of younger people”, creating “unnecessary and unhelpful division” between generations.
The committee notes that many older people are depicted as “living comfortable lives in homes they own while younger generations struggle on low incomes, unable to afford to enter the housing market and struggling with high rents”.
This is described as an “othering” narrative by the authors, and a “unique form of discrimination, as younger people essentially discriminate against their future selves”.
However, the argument that it is more challenging to be a young person in 2025 than it was for previous generations has a number of economic arguments that would support it.
Notably, house prices have skyrocketed while wage growth has steadily slowed. For the most part, property value remained steady against wage growth for most of the 1970s through to the late 1990s, bar a couple of disruptive economic episodes. This meant the average price of a home remained around four times higher than average earnings.
But this figure began to climb rapidly around the turn of the century, and in 2025 the average price of a home is 9.7 times higher than average earnings for a full-time worker.
Acknowledging this, the committee points to a 2020 study by the Centre for Better Ageing which argues that “the intergenerational ‘fairness’ narrative often ignores the fact that there is inequality within generations too.”
It adds: “This creates an inaccurate sense of competition for resources between generations, rather than between the wealthy and the poor. Generations then become proxies for either wealth or poverty, and the true picture of inequality is hidden.”
There are around 1.9 million pensioners living in poverty in the UK, a recent report from the Joseph Rowntree Foundation found – around 14 per cent of all pensioners.
The stereotype which depicts older people as “frail, helpless or incompetent” is also damaging, the committee found, and adds that the previous government failed to adequately address digital exclusion amongst older people as services like banking increasingly moved online.
The group says it wants to see a crackdown on these stereotypes in the media by watchdogs like the Advertising Standards Authority and Ofcom.
Committee chair Sarah Owen, Labour MP for Luton North, said that greater enforcement is needed to combat the UK’s “pervasively ageist culture”.
She said: “It is a considerable failure of government that the digital inclusion strategy has not been updated, nor progress tracked, for a decade.
“Ultimately much more must be done to tackle ageist attitudes and discrimination across society, including in access to healthcare, local services, banking and transport.”
