Why Britain’s silver generation is worth its weight in gold
ANEW bunch of peers is about to be announced. Unless it’s been a very well-kept secret, there’s one name that won’t be on the list, but who would be a true adornment to the House of Lords: Dame Esther Rantzen.
After a stellar career in TV, Dame Esther, now 79, has gone on to be a brilliantly inventive campaigner. Having set up Childline – one of those organisations you wonder how we ever did without – she created The Silver Line, designed to help combat loneliness in older people and to provide free information and advice.
It was in that capacity that she called yesterday for the Government to appoint a Minister for Older People. Writing in the Daily Express, she argued that the many vital issues affecting older people such as social care are currently “sliced up” between government departments.
There is no specific minister whose role is to look out for their interests, so those are too often being ignored.
She makes a good point. More often than not, when we read about older people in relation to the NHS it’s to blame them for being hospital bed blockers, or with social care it’s assuming they are infirm. Sometimes, they’re told they should downsize homes or resented as a generation that supposedly “had it good”.
BUT the 11 million pensioners in Britain today are as diverse as any other group. While some of them sometimes are consumers of public services, many are also huge contributors.
Sometimes that’s because, over their working lives, they have paid their taxes. Sometimes it’s because, even as pensioners, they still make an invaluable contribution – such as grandparents who look after children while parents work. I use the word “invaluable”. But one essential first step towards addressing this issue is that we start to value their contribution, not only in spirit but in hard economic terms.
In 2014, a report for Age UK found that people aged 65 and over contributed £61billion to the UK economy every year, through caring for loved ones, volunteering and indeed, simple employment. Childcare alone accounted for £6.6billion.
When you consider those amounts in the context of the £17.9billion total net spending on social care, things start to look very different. For too long we have seen the ever-rising demand for social care as if it is some sort of drain made by older people on the rest of us.
But these figures show it’s the rest of us who are relying on the economic contribution of older people – and by refusing to set up a properly functioning social care system we are in effect taking money from the old to spend on everyone else.
That makes the failure to tackle social care even more damning. For all the promises by successive governments, we are nowhere near tackling this, let alone settling on a consensus.
Dame Esther suggests that the only way this logjam will be broken is to have a Minister for Older People. She may be right. It’s certainly true that the appointment of a Minister for the Disabled in the 1970s was transformative, and Boris Johnson’s establishment of a Minister for Veterans’ Affairs has given focus to their needs.
A worry, however, is that social care is too big an issue for a lone minister and that far from pushing the broader needs of older people, it will somehow box them off.
WHAT is really needed is something more basic: for the Prime Minister to follow through on his repeated pledges to make social care a priority. There are any number of announcements of more money but even more necessary is a system that will work.
At the moment there is no sense of direction: merely promises the government will act.
This has consequences even now. Because there is no real focus on social care, care workers are labelled as “unskilled” so will fall foul of the new points-based immigration system. Fewer people will be available to work in care homes, which will push up wages and make them even more costly.
As with most policy areas which governments kick into touch because they are too complicated or politically difficult, all that happens is that the issue becomes even worse.
And the pressure can only intensify. Recent Office for National Statistics projections show that numbers of over-65s are expected to exceed 20 million by 2066.
With a majority of 80, no government has been better placed to act for many years. Whether there is a Minister for Older People or not, the need for change is urgent.
‘People 65 and over contribute £61bn to the economy every year’