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Concerns over an ageing population are overblown and society should learn to celebrate and capitalise on its “massive cohort of healthy, active, older, creative adults”, a leading population expert has said.

While pundits and pressure groups have raised concerns over falling fertility rates, highlighting the challenges for the economy and healthcare, others are more upbeat, arguing the rise of the “silver economy” brings new opportunities for growth.

Prof Sarah Harper, director of the Oxford Institute of Population Ageing, said two-thirds of the world’s countries already had fertility rates below the replacement level needed to maintain the same size population in the next generation, and that the ageing of most populations was inevitable.

But she said that brought with it certain positives. Harper said: “This is a success in so much as every baby that is born will have the opportunity – or should have the opportunity – to be highly educated, healthy and live a long, healthy life.”

While acknowledging there would be people living into their 80s and 90s who would become frail and need care, Harper said the main opportunity was to capitalise on the increasing health and education of older adults, especially those aged 50 to 70.

She said: “There are some challenges [to an ageing population], but there are also huge opportunities and rather than try and resist it, or stop it, or divert it we should be looking for those opportunities, because we have this massive cohort of healthy, active, older, creative adults.

“And because we’re still stuck in 20th-century institutions that don’t appreciate them and benefit from them, we need to create new ways of living and working that enable us to take advantage of that massive group of adults.”

Experts have stressed the importance of retraining workers, flexible working and a general shift in attitudes towards older workers. Harper said it was also important to tackle inequalities around health and education so that all older adults could make a valuable contribution.

Official figures show the UK population is growing, largely as a result of migration, but also ageing, with 27% of the population expected to be 65 or older by 2072.

While the baby boomer cohort is particularly large, creating a population bulge that will greatly increase the numbers in the oldest age groups in the coming decades, Harper said younger generations were smaller – and more similar – in size. That means in future the age structure of the population will resemble a skyscraper rather than the traditional pyramid.

Harper said: “Providing high quality affordable childcare is the key to unlocking the potential of both younger and older adults.”

Yet even Scandinavian countries, which have emphasised gender equality and positive parenting, have failed to raise total fertility rates above replacement level.

Harper said: “What we should be doing is saying there are ways that we can support those, particularly women, who want to have children, and that’s around things like good jobs, good housing, good childcare, good gender equality.

“But there is always going to be a group, probably growing, of women who have decided that they, for all sorts of reasons, are not going to have children. And in a way, we’ve got to accept that and work with that.”

While Harper said concerns over Covid, the climate crisis and overpopulation might be factors in why some have chosen not to have children, she said there were other reasons too, such as not seeing having children as necessarily part of being an adult woman.

“I think that is a really big psychological shift,” she said.

Harper added the idea that a country needed a high fertility rate was rooted in the outdated view that lots of young people were needed to defend a country. “Actually, we don’t need any more. The world has changed,” she said. “High income countries don’t need babies. We just need to change the structure, the economic structure in particular.”

Harper said that people aged 50 to 70 were an “amazing resource” with valuable skills for a knowledge-based economy, with many willing and able to work longer.

She said: “People also financially know that if they’re going to retire at 60 and then live for another 40 years … it’s just unsustainable on the kind of pension system we have. One approach to pension reform without disadvantaging people on lower incomes with poorer health and less education would be to link the state pension to national insurance contributions rather than age.”

Harper said some had drawn parallels with the rise of women in the workforce.

She said: “In the 50s and early 60s, people were saying, ‘Well, what are we going to do if all these women enter the labour market? What are we going to do? It will completely disrupt everything.’ But of course, it happened and now one takes it for granted in many countries [that] of course, women are working equally to men. Well, it’s the same idea for older adults.”