ABSTRACT
At the start of the twentieth century those aged 65 and over represented fewer than 5 per cent of the total population of England and Wales, compared with over 15 per cent now. This change reflects the transition from relatively high to low vital rates, most importantly the long-term decline in fertility rates. The absolute size of the elderly population has also increased considerably—by over 870,000 in the last quarter century alone. This increase is the result of past falls in mortality at younger ages, which resulted in increasing proportions surviving to old age, and more recently has been influenced by falls in death rates among the elderly themselves (Benjamin and Overton 1981; Grundy 1984). This latter change has accelerated the rate at which the elderly population itself is ageing. In the last decade (1976–86) the size of the whole elderly population aged 65 and over increased by less than 10 per cent, but the numbers aged 85 and over went up by a third. In 1986 there were 639,000 very old people aged 85 and over accounting for 1.3 per cent of the population as a whole; by the year 2006 those in this age group are projected to number 1,116, 000 and constitute 2.1 per cent of the total population (OPCS 1986).
