What we want
Some time between now and June, Britain goes to the polls in what is sure to be a landmark general election. Whichever way it goes, it is the Saga generation who will be the kingmakers. The over-50s are more likely to vote than any age group and are crucial to the way the key marginal seats will be decided. Certainly party leaders will want to woo the grey vote. But are they going to deal with the issues that are most important to older people?
So we can judge, Saga Magazine has brought together a ‘Company of Elders’ – commentators, experts and opinion-formers – and asked each to identify one key point they would want the incoming government to act upon. And we’ve produced our own Saga Manifesto based on surveys of thousands of our readers: see page 53 for your voice. We have challenged the leaders of the three main parties to address these points and set out their store for your vote. Watch this space.
Emma Soames - End ageism in the NHS
We raised the issue of age discrimination in the NHS in Saga Magazine many months ago and thus I am delighted that, since then, the Government is now in consultation mode around this very issue. But we should not hold our breath – buried in the small print of the Government document is the revelation that the implementation of change has been put back to the next Parliament in 2012.
Age discrimination causes real heartache and worry to older people and their relatives: attitudes among medical staff from consultants downwards in our hospitals have become so blatantly discriminatory that thousands of people are literally terrified of going into hospital – not out of understandable nervousness about outcomes but about the likelihood of negligence and only a remote chance of getting a fair crack of the medical whip. Older people seem to go to the back of every queue, be it for treatment for strokes or proper and compassionate nursing.
In far too many cases the old and frail are blatantly short-changed and in far too many cases negligently treated on wards by nursing staff who should know better. Indeed, recently the Royal College of Nursing had to issue an edict to its members to look after old patients properly and not to treat them as bed-blocking inconveniences. It had come to that.
There is so much that needs to be improved in this area and new rules can only improve things. However, we live in a world of living wills and one-way tickets to Switzerland. I do not believe that we want the pendulum to swing so far in the opposite direction that very old frail people are kept alive against their own wishes. It is a narrow tightrope that new legislation needs to tread and if ever common sense were required, it is around this issue.
Emma Soames is Saga Magazine’s Editor-at-Large
Joan Bakewell - Reinvent retirement
In the days when people ran their own lives – peasant communities, hippy communes – the day you gave it all up was largely your decision. Failing health or loss of skills would register among the community and you might then be given lighter tasks. How you grew old and stopped being a productive part of your society would be a matter settled for each individual.
Only with industrialisation and the arrival of the workplace – factories, offices and such – did those who ran them need to know and organise their workforce with rules that applied to everyone and that everyone could understand.
Then the State took an interest in the matter and decided that older people simply couldn’t be thrown on to the scrapheap at the mercy of their families. They deserved something better than that. They deserved a pension they could live on and they deserved a statutory age of retirement.
Then we started living for longer and staying fitter well beyond the state’s pensionable age of 60 or 65. The state pension and the set retirement age are the invention of high-performance industrial societies. So calls for change as the population ages are not that outrageous. It just means that employers and the State need to realise the inevitable: we live longer, we need to work longer, the young can’t afford to support us and society needs our contribution. What is there to disagree with? Government is proving sluggish in adapting to the new situation. Employers are alarmed at having to tailor their retirement provisions to suit individual cases, and the eager and ambitious young want to see the back of those in the top jobs who are blocking their advancement. The answer to these problems is not to pretend they don’t exist. The answer is to solve them.
For the most part, changes to retirement regulations are seen by employers as a concession being granted to the nagging old who are making life a misery – talking to the press, going to employment tribunals – whenever they refuse to countenance change. This won’t do.
Options such as part-time work, flexible hours, a shorter working week, job sharing, will become the pattern of the future. In return, those in top jobs with big responsibilities can’t expect to hold on to their top-ranking roles.
They will need, in all humility, to recognise that they must move to a lower but equally engaging position in the company. No, this doesn’t mean that the managing director will become the car-park attendant. But it does call for a way of redeploying talent in the workforce that carries with it the wisdom of age, but may lack familiarity with the latest and most innovative work techniques.
All this sounds a lot of trouble to implement. It is certainly more complex than simply saying “Right, you’re 60: here’s the watch and there’s the door.” It may be that companies have to interact more thoughtfully so that older employees can move within the crafts they know, to where they can be most useful, mentoring younger employees, for example. This calls for imagination, consultation and experiment. But the companies and employers who adapt and change will gain the loyalty of their workforce.
We can no longer play a delaying game and hope employers – private and public – will one day get round to adapting to the existing situation. The default retirement age is doomed. The patterns of the lives we lead are changing in fundamental ways, ways that affect all generations.
The sooner we look on the bright side and realise there are gains here for everyone, the happier our community will be. And I won’t be getting letters from sad and able people bewildered as to why they are no longer wanted.
Broadcaster Joan Bakewell is the Government’s Voice for Older People
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