OAPs abused at home
MILLIONS more lonely older people won’t have to suffer in silence after Dame Esther Rantzen’s charity The Silver Line merged with Age UK.
Britain’s only 24-hour helpline for isolated OAPs today joins forces with the UK’s largest charity for older people to meet soaring demand for its service.
The epidemic of loneliness among pensioners is now so great, one in every five of the 10,500 calls it receives every week goes unanswered.
The move has secured its long-term future, meaning every call will be answered while the service receives the financial backing to expand.
It has also ended the lifelong campaigner’s torment over whether her project – which is backed by the Daily Express’s Respect for the Elderly crusade and whose patron is the Duchess of Cornwall – would be forced to close.
The Silver Line is currently funded entirely by public donations, with Daily Express readers digging deep to donate tens of thousands of pounds.
The service costs £4million a year to run, but a five-year £10million lottery grant came to an end last year plunging it into a crisis.
Dame Esther, 79, who set up The Silver Line in 2013, said: “There have been heartbreaking times when I wondered if it could survive. It has literally become a lifeline. I couldn’t bear the idea our charity would cease to exist, none of our team could. I know they had sleepless nights, wouldn’t take holidays and worked incredibly long hours just to keep it going.”
The Silver Line will keep its name, with the charity becoming a subsidiary of Age UK.
It echoes what happened to Childline, set up by Dame Esther in 1986, which merged with the NSPCC in 2005 in a move she described as “the best decision we ever made”.
There are now thought to be at least 1.2 million chronically lonely older people in the UK with 500,000 spending at least five days a week without seeing or speaking to anyone. ● The Silver Line number is 0800 4 70 80 90. To donate visit thesilverline.org.uk