Читать книгу Not Dead Yet: A Manifesto for Old Age - Julia Neuberger - Страница 38

End begging for entitlements

We’ve been together now for forty years, And it don’t seem a day too much.

Opening lines of the popular song ‘My Old Dutch’, sung at the poorhouse gates where the performer is about to be separated permanently from his wife

While I don’t have a problem getting out of the house, it’s hard to find somewhere affordable to go. The cost determines what you can do. I’d like to go out more but I can’t afford to. If I can’t afford something, I just don’t have it. Things aren’t always easy, but you get through. I’m not defeatist – I can cope with most things … The only thing I can’t cope with is missing the wife.

Gerald Williams, 70s, quoted in Help the Aged Spotlight report

It is a good quarter century ago since I first got a wake-up call about some of the difficulties older people have with money, but it still feels shocking even now. I was a rabbi in Streatham at the time, and there was an older woman whom I came to know, who had been pretty confident and adept at making the benefits system work when I first knew her. Then she had a particularly nasty episode of mental illness, and when she had recovered she found enormous difficulty summoning up the gutsiness she needed to deal with the benefits office. She couldn’t bear to go there by herself, so I went with her as her rabbi. As extra comfort, she also brought along her dog.

The dog was the first problem: the benefits staff were very difficult about her bringing it in. But there then followed the most extraordinary, frustrating and undignified interview. The benefits officer kept asking her for evidence to prove who she was. This was particularly peculiar because I was there to vouch for her, and I had brought my passport to prove who I was. But the real point was that not only was she well known to the system, but this benefits officer actually knew her.

They could see she was vulnerable, and knew she had been mentally ill, but they still gave her a really difficult interview. It was as if the benefits officers had been trained to be obstructive, and so it proved. In fact, when I complained about her treatment, I was told that this was normal practice.

It was also deeply unkind. It had taken a great deal of guts to go to the benefits office in the first place after what she had been through. I realized that the fact that she was old and vulnerable made it easier for them to behave like that. If that is not discrimination against the elderly, I don’t know what is.

In the years since then, I have been struck by the huge differ ence between benefits offices. There are those that make an effort to reach out to older people and make sure they get any money they are entitled to, and there are those which – if they don’t actually bully older claimants – take advantage of their reluctance to be supplicants to a complex and aggressive bureaucracy.

Let’s not pretend that money is a problem for all older people. Many of them are extremely wealthy. But my time as a rabbi, and more recently chairing an NHS trust, has made me realize how many older people have real difficulty claiming what they are entitled to. They don’t want to beg, so they don’t try. The result is that, for those older people who are short of money, their financial problems are seriously exacerbated. There is a similar exacerbation of other problems in old age, like poor housing, for the same reason. That is how so many older people end up much more seriously impoverished than those around them.

Take the case of James Purvis, then 68, who featured in the series of articles written by the investigative journalist Nick Davies in the Guardian in 2005.1 Mr Purvis lived in King’s Cross, in a small, dark, damp flat – so much of the poverty of older people is related to housing problems – with a ‘thin skin of mould … on some of his furniture’. He lived alone, seeing few people, but had one pleasure: he travelled around London on his free bus pass, taking photographs.

He could not afford to take many photographs on his pension – just one roll of 35 photos a week – because he had to pay Jessops £7.99 to get each one processed. He made it a rule never to spend more than £5 a week on gas – he lives on his state pension – so, in the winter, he often stayed in bed for much of the day, and he only spent £5 a week on electricity, using the microwave his daughter gave him to keep the costs down on cooking food.

‘Mr Purvis has cut down on eating,’ wrote Nick Davies. ‘Like many older people, there are other things he needs or wants out of not very much money, and food does not come high up the list.’ It is no surprise that malnutrition amongst older people is common. Indeed, the European Nutrition for Health Alliance argued in 2005 that poverty is probably the greatest social cause of malnutrition, combined with loneliness and social isolation, and the story of Mr Purvis fits this combination of categories perfectly.

His wife went back to Newcastle some 20 years earlier and he sometimes likes to hear voices that do not come from the television. Like many older men whose relationships have broken down, he also feels a bit of a failure, though he sees his daughter most weeks. But this is a common story of the absence of love, the absence of money to do the things he would like to do, and the recognition that – as he gets older and poorer, and costs of housing and gas and electricity go up – he will have to give up the one thing he really likes doing, his photography.

‘He thinks it’s a bit of a joke really, the idea of him sitting in this little flat all day, with the smell of damp and the curtains drawn,’ wrote Davies. ‘If there is no other way to make ends meet, he will just have to give up the photography and make the most of life alone.’

The story of Mr Purvis is one about a man who, though retired, does actually have a passion in life, which he is all but prevented from exercising because he is living in such poverty. Poverty and old age were such companions in debate a century ago, when the commission on the poor laws was first building a consensus for the first old age pension, that it was hard to discuss them apart, with the tragic separation of couples at the poorhouse door. The fact that we have had state pensions, however inadequate, for a century since then means that they no longer have to go together in quite the same way. As we shall see, many older people are quite well off these days.

Any book on old age must cover the question of money, but I am not going to write in detail about pensions, because it is a hugely vexed issue, and I am no expert. Pensions deserve a book of their own, and there are many of those already. Even so, money, its absence, and concern about it, are all key to any consideration of what old age can and should be like. It also looks as though our attitude to money in old age needs a great deal of re-examination. Whatever middle-aged people feel now, there is no doubt that younger people are feeling concerned that they will have to pay for their own pensions and their parents’ pensions too.

These are important considerations when it comes to practical politics. People resent having to pay for long-term care in old age, and having to sell their home in order to do so, but the cost of the state bearing the entire amount might just be too great politically. Younger people would object. The politics of dividing the national cake is beyond the scope of this book too, so this chapter will simply look at some of the outstanding financial issues facing older people, and some of the things we might be able to do about them if we are really creating a manifesto for old age.