“Older people have never had it so good”, the headlines declare, above pictures of smiling silver-haired couples and stories about retirees enjoying the fruits of generous occupational pensions.
Pair that with tales of younger people struggling with the effects of spending cuts and it’s easy to imagine that the privations of austerity have passed older people by entirely. But it’s a narrative that simply isn’t true, campaigners and experts say.
It’s not just cuts to adult social care – perhaps the most obvious measure affecting older people. The withdrawal of funding for things like local buses, libraries, and small volunteer-run services is also common.
“If you’re a local authority you have a really difficult set of choices to make about what you don’t fund any more and it tends to be the ‘softer’ stuff that our residents have relied on that go,” says Dame Clare Tickell, chief executive of housing association Hanover.
“In rural areas, bus services being cut back has a huge impact. In cities it’s more about things like befriending services – infrastructure services supported through grants from local authorities to encourage volunteering. On lots of our estates there are fewer of the small charities that used to provide services for our residents.”
In January, the Campaign for Better Transport revealed that half of local authorities in England and Wales have cut funding for buses in the current financial year, with more than £9m in funding disappearing. Since 2010, more than 2000 routes have been reduced or withdrawn entirely.
Meanwhile, Tickell says, the thresholds at which local authorities discharge their duty of care are going up, and those people being referred to Hanover have a greater range, and higher level, of need.
“Older people may have a final salary pension scheme but in fact those things that assist in them being mobile, and connected with other people, are becoming harder,” she explains. “But we all have an enormous amount invested in providing support and access to community for older people. When you don’t do that they become isolated and lonely, which is horrible for them, and they end up in hospital, which is expensive for the state.”
She’s frustrated that there isn’t enough joined-up thinking on this because agencies are keen to protect their own funding. “We need to get in players from health, social care, housing, whoever else, and say ‘if we need to save money, how can we make the system better?’ – realising that the saving may not accrue to their direct area of spend.”
In cash terms, it’s true that other groups have been hit harder by cuts than older people. A 2014 report for the Equality and Human Rights Commission shows that the three groups that suffered most from public spending changes were households where the household respondent person was aged under 25, 35-44, and 45-54. But as one of the report’s authors, the National Institute of Economic and Social Research’s Jonathan Portes points out (pdf), local authority-funded pensioners in residential care, an important group, are not included in the analysis.
But in qualitative terms, some general cuts may hit older people more. If you no longer go out to work, a lack of money for things that make your local area a better place to be is far more obvious, says Caroline Abrahams, Age UK’s charity director.
“Older people are big users of public services, so the more they’re scaled back, the greater the impact is going to be on them,” she says, highlighting local arts and cultural activities, and small pots of money that subsidise local social clubs or outings. “Quite often older people have continued to use the library as a useful place to go, particularly if they’re not online,” she adds.
Almost three in 10 people aged 65-74, and 63% of over 75s have never used the internet, according to the Office for National Statistics. Last month it was reported that the closure of libraries across the country had led to a 40m fall in the number of annual visitors in the last four years.
The chair of the Local Government Association, David Sparks, says councils have tried to protect key services, but have been hampered by the sheer scale of the budget cuts imposed by central government. Councils have had to switch £900m from other services to fund elderly care, he told the BBC recently.
“Some 60% of local authorities that we recently contacted stated that they were now considering, or had implemented, cuts in other services in order to maintain adult social care,” Sparks says.
“In 2016 and 2017 the financial situation of many local authorities will be questionable, and some may be unsustainable, because by definition the easier cuts have already been made, and many of the cuts can’t be repeated. You can only close a library or a leisure centre once.”
But despite the gloomy picture on funding, Tickell warns against stereotyping older people as purely passive, when in reality they may have much to bring to the table themselves in the age of austerity.
“The idea they’re all sitting waiting for someone to come and be kind to them is completely nuts,” she says. “There’s an enormous amount of social capital that’s unharnessed with older people: they do things like mentoring teenagers, fostering, and acting as trustees for charities. They have lots to offer.”
Content on this page is paid for and produced to a brief agreed with Hanover, one of the sponsors of the Guardian Ageing Population series.
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