Elderly left counting pennies in paradise
It was not until Trevor Robinson received a letter notifying him of a missed appointment at the hospital that he realised he had not spoken to another human being in more than six weeks.
Robinson, 77, a retired gardener, had spent most of that time alone, sitting on his favourite frayed leather recliner looking out the window at the moorland surrounding his cottage in Cumbria.
“When you spend every second by yourself, you lose track of time,” he said as tears trickled down his face. “I feel lonely, very lonely, and bored.”
Robinson’s isolation, shared by thousands of older people in Britain, is the result of a chain of cause-andeffect that stretches from rural Cumbria to the halls of power in London.
He used to ride a subsidised bus to town until the local council discontinued the route. The council was responding to steep budget cutbacks stemming from the Conservative-led Government’s decadelong austerity programme.
Even as austerity has sliced through nearly every aspect of British life, the Government has protected high-profile benefits for older people, and it has raised the state pension on a more generous basis than previous administrations.
But a free bus pass is of little use if buses no longer reach you, and many retired people have discovered that apparently minor cuts — the elimination of a bus route, the closing of a tiny healthcare centre, community centre or post office — can profoundly upend their lives.
The effects are especially pronounced in rural areas, where the isolation of older residents has emerged as one of the greatest, and largely hidden, costs of local councils’ strained budgets, with funding slashed by half nationwide since 2010, the National Audit Office has
found. While experts say these problems are common to much of Britain’s countryside, they are particularly severe in Cumbria. Best known for its Lake District National Park and lakeside mansions, it is also one of the poorest rural areas in England.
Twenty-nine of its communities are among the 10 per cent most deprived nationwide. Household income levels trail the national average in all but one district.
And by 2020, nearly a quarter of Cumbria’s residents will be over 65 — 5 percentage points higher than in 2008 and double the proportion projected for London. Half of those have long-term health problems or disabilities.
Cumbria has had problems since its lead and zinc mines closed in the 1960s. But they have been amplified by austerity. This year, Cumbria County Council plans to cut about US$23 million from its budget to cushion a steady drop in funding from the national Government — to US$17.7m this year from nearly US$200m in 2012.
By 2021, the council expects the grant to disappear entirely, despite recent declarations by Conservative Party leaders that the austerity era is over. In April last year, Cumbria raised its local council tax by 4 per cent, the first rise in several years, after the Government eased restrictions on such increases.
“It’s always been expensive to deliver services to rural communities because the population is so spread out,” said Peter Thornton, the council’s deputy leader and Cabinet member for finance. “But since the central government cuts that started in 2010 this becomes more of a challenge each year.”
The council’s first major cut to services came in 2014: ending bus subsidies. It saved around £9m a year, and lost about 60 per cent of the area’s bus services.
“But we are starting to rethink ways of providing transport,” Thornton said. “There’s increasing recognition of how these cuts have contributed to the problem of rural isolation and the impact on people’s mental health.”
Bus cuts are becoming a national issue. Labour Party leader Jeremy Corbyn proposed to spend £1.3b to restore lost services.
Until recent years, the quality of life for seniors had steadily improved. From a high point in the mid-1990s, the poverty rate among older people had declined, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation says, falling to 13 per cent in 2012-13 before rising to 16 per cent in 2015-16. But one in six pensioners remain in poverty and the rate has started to increase. “After positive progress, it is worrying that the number of pensioners living in poverty is once again on the rise,” said Caroline Abrahams, charity director at Age UK, Britain’s largest charity working with older people. And with the slowdown in economic growth associated with Britain’s tortured withdrawal from the European Union, the Government is facing renewed budgetary strains.
Two years ago, barely able to walk after he developed an infection following bunion surgery, Robinson applied for an attendance allowance, a benefit for people over 65 who are disabled. His problem was deemed not severe enough.
“You pay taxes your whole life thinking the government’s going to take care of you when you’re old and dying, but their message to me was loud and clear,” he said, his voice rising. “They don’t give a damn.”
Many seniors and their advocates say such rejections have grown increasingly common as welfare rules have tightened.
“General benefits are a lot harder to get than 10 years ago,” said Hugh Tomlinson, the deputy CEO of Age UK in South Lakeland, part of Cumbria. His clients’ rejection rate for attendance allowance, he says, has doubled in three years.
“A lot of those decisions get overturned on appeal,” Tomlinson said, adding that he suspected the rejections were part of a new strategy calculating that few older people would take that step. “Our offices have had to convince a lot of people to appeal.”
Perhaps most disturbing for older residents is the shrinking healthcare sector, as hospitals close and doctors cluster in larger towns.
This has been driven in large part by a funding formula that measures wealth partly on the number of cars per household — an absolute necessity in remote areas, but not in cities. As a result, officials say, Cumbria receives one of the lowest public health allocations per capita in the country, around US$50 compared with about US$235 in London.
In 2016, Alston hospital’s inpatient unit, with its seven beds, had to close because of staffing shortages caused by its isolation and lack of transport. Local residents met the decision with fierce opposition, because the beds were often the only place where the dying could spend their final days among friends and family. “I’ve seen two people there who were about to leave us,” said Steve Frogley, 69, a retired electrician. “Now, people in that state are all the way in Carlisle or Hexham, and it’s really hard for their loved ones to go and visit them.”