Age of Opportunity - Transforming the lives of older people in poverty
Police key to ending isolation and loneliness of a lost generation of pensioners, says CSJ
Specialist local teams should be established immediately in order to fight the epidemic of poverty and isolation in later life, according to a landmark report published today by the Centre for Social Justice.
Expert units made up of local community leaders, police officers, older people's charities and council officers should be set up to find and support the estimated one million pensioners who report feeling lonely or trapped in their homes.
Modelled on a project in one of the poorest and most crime-ridden parts of Manchester, neighbourhood policing teams should join volunteers in knocking on doors to reassure the elderly and bring them help.
Other ground-breaking new community programmes from the US and the UK should be put on a national footing to bring relief to the old.
In its call for radical action, the CSJ draws heavily on pioneering initiatives it found in Seattle in the United States, where older people are redesigning their communities and deciding where public money should be spent. The report says this should help to shape the Coalition's 'Big Society' programme.
Other measures should be taken to rebuild links between the elderly and their local communities, tackle dangerous housing standards, transform the UK's collapsing social care system and support its 6 million unpaid carers who save the country nearly £90 billion a year.
The report from the Centre for Social Justice, Age of Opportunity - Transforming the lives of older people in poverty, amounts to a radical blueprint for both a cultural and policy-based shift in society's attitudes towards the over-65s, expected to reach 12 million people in 15 years from now.
The report will be launched on Wednesday June 29 in Westminster at an event attended by Pensions Minister Steve Webb.
"In this report we outline how government, communities, families and older people can work together to make later life an age of opportunity," says CSJ Executive Director Gavin Poole.
The report, sponsored by Age UK and Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, was produced by an expert working group and warns that the suffering and tragedy of pensioner poverty is an urgent issue, not a cloud on a demographic horizon.
It needs to be tackled now with an imaginative range of reform ideas in which charities will play a key role alongside national and local government agencies.
A housing shake-up lies at the heart of the CSJ report.
It warns that Britain is now faced by growing numbers of pensioners living in their own homes but unable to meet repair and maintenance costs.
"The result is significant housing poverty among older homeowners, especially in the private sector."
"Currently there are 3.2 million older householders living in non-decent private sector homes."
The report warns that the poorest older householders faced a "perfect storm" because of the loss of grants for repairs to crumbling private homes, the failure of efforts to help the elderly release equity from their properties, inefficiencies in the grant system to help old people adapt their homes to cope with their disabilities, and poor progress on home insulation.
It calls for renewed efforts to tackle these problems. "The cultural aversion to older homeowners using equity release to improve their quality of life and housing needs to be challenged at every level."
Funding for private sector renewal grants should be temporarily restored until moves by local and national government reinvigorate equity release schemes for the old.
With the Government's Dilnot Commission due to report shortly on the funding of social care, the CSJ report concentrates on defining what kind of care should be funded.
The twin objectives of preventing older people from going into care homes and improving the quality of such homes should run in tandem.
"Efforts must be focused simultaneously on maintaining the independence of the frailest older people - through supporting their unpaid carers, providing lower level support and creating integrated multidisciplinary teams for the most vulnerable - as well as recognising that, since the need for care homes is not going to go away, the long-term care sector requires radical reform."
The report, which is a follow up to last year's publication The Forgotten Age, also calls on the Government to target state benefits on the pensioners most in need, with one in five living below the poverty line.
"There needs to be a major focus of targeting age-related benefits towards those who really need them in order to help them out of poverty," Mr Poole writes in a preface to the report.
The report urges a revamp of the winter fuel payment, now declining sharply in real terms value, which is estimated to keep 200,000 households out of fuel poverty each year.
The benefit, worth £200 to pensioner households, is paid to everyone regardless of income. The CSJ recommends that more of it goes to the poorest older people by ending its universal payment.
Equally, it suggests the concessionary bus pass should be treated as a taxable benefit and the money saved earmarked for community transport services to help older people.
The report also calls for greater planning for older age - starting at school - and more support for unpaid carers by allowing GPs to give 'respite prescriptions'.
For media inquiries, please contact Nick Wood of Media Intelligence Partners Ltd on 07889 617003 or 0203 008 8146 or Alistair Thompson on 07970 162225 or 0203 008 8145.
Advance copies of the Age of Opportunity are available to the media from MIP.
NOTES TO EDITORS
The Centre for Social Justice is an independent think tank established by Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP in 2004, to seek effective solutions to the poverty that blights parts of Britain.
In July 2007 the group published Breakthrough Britain. Ending the Costs of Social Breakdown. The paper presented over 190 policy proposals aimed at ending the growing social divide in Britain.
Subsequent reports have put forward proposals for reform of the police, prisons, social housing, the asylum system and family law. Other reports have dealt with street gangs and early intervention to help families with young children.
The Rt Hon Iain Duncan Smith MP stood down as Chairman of the Centre on his appointment as Secretary of State for Work and Pensions in May 2010 and is now the Founder and Patron.
Age of Opportunity Report Launch
Date: Wednesday 29th June
Venue: Church House Conference Centre, London SW1P 3NZ
Time: 10am - 11am
Copies of the Age of Opportunity will be available from the www.centreforsocialjustice.org.uk following the launch event
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