It was an ordinary work day in April 2025 when Michael Gibbons, then 61, logged on for his usual weekly catch-up with his line manager. But when he noticed there was someone from HR on the call, his heart sank. After nine years of working for his company as a global root cause analysis consultant and industrial incident investigator, he was told he was being let go because of company-wide redundancies. “I was gutted – I loved my work,” he remembers. “At 61, I really thought it would be my job until I retired. I never thought I would be in that position.”
At first, Michael, who is based in Stafford, didn’t feel too worried. He expected it would be easy to find another job because he was highly skilled and qualified. But after a year, and over a hundred applications later, he started to panic. The money was running out.
“I didn’t hear back from most jobs, or it was a ‘thanks, but no thanks’,” he says. At one point, he remembers applying for one position as a root cause analysis specialist, the exact job he had been doing for the last nine years. Although he got through to the interview stage, he was unsuccessful. “Two months later, that same job was re-advertised, and when I re-applied, they told me, ‘oh no, you can’t reapply’,” he says. “That’s when I knew it was down to my age, the fact I was 61. It was frustrating.”
A mortgage, monthly car payments and mounting bills meant that Michael was forced to sell his personal possessions to get by. Eventually, he signed up for universal credit, joining over seven million people – a fifth of working-age adults in England and Wales – claiming Britain’s main unemployment or sickness benefit.
“It was demoralising and deflating,” he says. “Your pride and confidence drop to an all-time low because you just think, how did it come to this? I’m not in the middle of my career; I’m at the end. What am I going to do? I’m highly knowledgeable and skilled, and now I’m walking up the steps of the job centre to beg them for £400 a month. I don’t understand how people survive on it.”
He says on top of everything, his relationship ended because of the financial and emotional stress. “You sit there at night and you worry to the point where you sometimes cry yourself to sleep. I’ve already had three heart attacks. At times I actually thought, why am I here? I can’t do this anymore.”
Michael isn’t alone. Around 750,000 Britons aged 50-64 are job-hunting or willing to work, but economically inactive, government figures indicate. The increase in the unemployment rate for 50 to 64 year-olds – to 3.1 per cent in 2025, up from 2.4 per cent the year before – is higher than for any other age group, numbers from the Office for National Statistics show.
According to research from the Centre for Ageing Better, one in eight workers aged 45 and older believe age has been a factor in them missing out on a job or promotion, and of these workers, 40 per cent have either been explicitly told their age was a factor, or they say it was implied.
Michelle will never forget how “absolutely humbling” it was, the first time she ever set foot in a job centre, in Bracknell, the neighbouring town to her home in Ascot. The 51-year-old had spent over 25 years building an international career in marketing, most recently in senior director-level positions in London. But when she unexpectedly lost her job in April this year, she found herself struggling to meet her monthly mortgage payments for the family home she lived in with her two children.
Michelle had already been made redundant recently in 2025, and it had taken nine gruelling months to find another job. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Paired with a divorce, she found herself relying on credit cards and even defaulting on her mortgage a couple of times. This time around, when a friend suggested she apply for benefits to tide her over, she initially baulked at the stigma.
“No, no, it’s not for me,” she remembers saying. “That’s not the calibre of person I am, it’s for low-income jobs.” But the financial stress was too much to bear and for the first time in her life, this summer, she found herself applying for universal credit and New Job Seekers Allowance. On the morning of her appointment at the job centre, she put on a professional outfit, a habit from working in the city for decades. But when she walked through the front door, she was embarrassed. “I thought, oh god, what do I look like to everyone here? I must look really odd, that I don’t deserve to get financial help.”
Michelle went through a lengthy application process with delays and “loads of bureaucracy”, until five months later, she got her first UC cheque for £650 a month. She remembers thinking: “Oh, I went through all of that, for this.”
UC claimants are required to keep a strict log of all job applications and Michelle realised the hard way that if she failed to log her “minimum activity” correctly, she would be cut off “instantaneously”. One month, when her cheque didn’t arrive, she saw she had been rejected on the portal even though she had applied for over 100 jobs in that period because she had forgotten to record them all. She had to raise an appeal, have a separate appointment to have her paperwork verified by a human, then it took six weeks for the appeals department to make a decision. “I’m just emotionally exhausted,” she says. “It’s hard not to take it personally.”
She says although staff are generally empathetic and helpful, she believes their expertise is more geared to entry-level, lower-skilled roles, rather than the mid-level or senior positions aligned to the rising number of out-of-work professionals in their 50s or 60s.
In fact, Michael feels that the benefits system is not geared up for the older generation at all, especially those with a wealth of experience, qualifications and extensive work history. “They don’t know what to do with us,” he says. “Gone are the days when you could go into the job centre and they would help you find a job. You’re left on your own. I was categorically told to ‘apply for any job ’, or I would be sanctioned. I said, I can’t apply to Tesco as a shelf stacker with my qualifications because I won’t even get looked at. They told me to do it anyway. In my opinion, [UC] is geared towards the young and the less experienced.”
Michael ended up working as an Amazon driver initially, but when he was offered freelance work related to his actual career, he found himself weighing up whether it was worth it for what might be deducted from his universal credit as a result. “They deduct around 50 pence in every pound, for every pound you earn. It gets to the stage where, even though you’re signed on, you’re not actually earning any money because the money that you are earning, they take off you. Then you worry about rent, electric, gas, mobile phone – all the things I needed to go back to work.”
Similarly, Michelle has often wondered whether the system hinders workers getting back on their feet by obstructing part-time work related to their industry. “Even if I want to pick up any freelance work for a specific marketing project, I have to think, is it worth it? Because I either have to ask universal credit for a pause or you have to reapply, and that will take the whole process from the beginning.”
Michelle says right now she feels powerless when she thinks about her future. “You go through your own grief cycle, and then you need to find the energy and positivity to sell yourself again and again to an AI system or talent acquisition recruiters or a potential line manager who, within the first 10 seconds of a video call, will decide if they like you or not. They might entertain you for an hour, or make you do a case study where you’re doing additional free work for this company.”
Michelle has a close friend, a former CFO of an enterprise company who was made redundant, and has ended up doing deliveries for Waitrose. “We don’t talk about these things because on LinkedIn it’s all about positivity, taking ‘pause’, finding ourselves and then celebrating the next job,” she says. “We don’t say, I’ve been made redundant and struggling and this is what I’m going through.”
Michael tells me he is elated that he has found another job which he will be starting this month. “The sense of relief was enormous,” he says. “I feel emotional just thinking about it. I’ve got my life back. Even when I was sitting in the interview, I was thinking in my head, I’m not getting this – they’re interviewing people younger than me, and I’m 62. But they loved me.”
Retirement was never at the forefront of Michael’s mind as he enjoys his job and wants to continue working well into his 80s, if he can. But he is grateful that it would no longer be out of necessity. “I found myself thinking, I can’t afford to retire now anyway, even if I wanted to, I’ve got to keep working until I die,” he says. “To everyone else in that position, all I would say is don’t give up. Keep going, keep putting the work in – the determination, the blood, sweat, and the tears. You will get there.”