“Many modern workplaces have neuro-inclusive breakout spaces, and rightly so: that work matters,” said Sarah Pasquall, Interaction’s creative lead. “But almost none of them mention that a cold metal door handle is genuinely painful if you have arthritis, or that modern meeting rooms can be unusable for someone with a hearing aid. Some areas of inclusive design have really improved, but this isn’t one of them.”

The checklist, aimed at landlords, employers, facilities teams and fit-out specifiers, covers door hardware specified for reduced grip strength, hearing loops and captioning in meeting rooms, lighting and signage contrast for ageing eyesight, environmental controls for menopause-related needs, and support for staff learning new workplace technology.

The demographic case for paying attention is not really in dispute. The Centre for Ageing Better puts the figure at a third of the workforce in England, nearly nine million people, aged 50 or over. DWP figures published in September, covering April to June this year, show the average age of exit from the UK labour market has reached 65.8 for men, unchanged on last year, and 65.1 for women, up from 64.7, both the highest levels on record. The State Pension age is rising from 66 to 67 between April 2026 and April 2028, which pushes the incentive to keep working later still further out. Sickness, injury or disability remains the most commonly cited reason people in this age group leave the workforce rather than choosing to, at 43.8%, a reminder that the design of the physical environment is not a marginal factor in how long people stay.

None of this is new information, which is itself part of the story. The most detailed UK academic study of office design for older workers remains a Royal College of Art project from 2008, run out of the Helen Hamlyn Centre with around 80 knowledge workers in London, Yokohama and Melbourne. It found that the eye of a 20 year old admits roughly three times more light than the eye of a 65 year old, that muscular strength falls by 15 to 20% between those same ages, and, pointedly, that researchers could find no link between age and job performance. Its main recommendation, that offices need distinct spaces for concentration, collaboration and contemplation rather than open plan and hot-desking by default, reads like a description of what many workplace strategies are only now arriving at for entirely different reasons. Eighteen years on, that remains close to the most current word on the subject, which suggests the gap Interaction is pointing at has had a long time to go unaddressed rather than a short one.

What happens next probably depends less on any single checklist than on where the responsibility for this sits. Door hardware, lighting specification and meeting room acoustics are decisions made at procurement and fit-out stage, often years before a building’s eventual occupants are known, which makes them easy to treat as generic rather than inclusive. Whether landlords and fit-out specifiers start treating age-related accessibility as a baseline specification rather than an optional add-on, in the way that neuro-inclusive design has increasingly become, is the question this checklist is really testing.

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