Archbishop – older people ‘are still participants in society, not passengers’

Friday 14th December 2012

Speaking in his introductory speech, he argued that  there is a misconception about older people and that, rather than being seen a 'burden', they should instead be recognised for the enormous amount of voluntary work that they do in their communities:

"As things stand, more than half the over-60 population are involved in some sort of formal and structured voluntary work; over half of the population believes that this is part of what they should aspire to in later life, and a third are willing to take part in informal volunteering.  These facts are of basic importance.  It means, quite simply, that a majority of the older population are ready to do what they can, unpaid, to support the fabric of society; they are doing exactly what we expect responsible citizens to do. "

In recognising that older people may well find their physical independence reduced, the Archbishop urged that they should be supported so as to allow them to continue making their valuable contribution to their communities:

"It is of course a fact that advancing age is likely to decrease physical independence in various ways.  But rather than taking this as the core issue, we should see questions of dependency as basically about how our public policy and resourcing seeks to preserve both dignity and capacity among those who may be increasingly physically challenged but remain citizens capable of contributing vital things to the social fabric."

In stressing the importance of different generations engaging with one another, Dr Williams suggested that it is the Churches and other faith communities who play a key role in facilitating this at grass roots level:

"As family structures become looser and more scattered geographically, it is vital that there be regular opportunities for interaction between younger and older people, not least between children and older citizens, whether through schools arranging visiting and befriending or through formal and informal oral history projects. It is here that the contribution of churches and faith communities is particularly significant: in a good many contexts, these are simply the most robust and effective promoters both of intergenerational contact and formal or informal volunteering opportunities for older people."

This intergenerational engagement is of particular significance when we are dealing with a society where:

"A great deal of our culture is frenetically oriented towards youth – notably in entertainment and marketing.  This is understandable up to a point: people want to put down markers for the future as they see it.  But its effect can be both to ignore the present reality of responsible, active people in older life, who are still participants in society, not passengers – and to encourage younger people to forget that they are ageing themselves, and that they will be in need of positive and hopeful models for their own later years."

"We tolerate a very eccentric view of the good life or the ideal life as one that can be lived only for a few years between, say, eighteen and forty.  The ‘extremes’ of human life, childhood and age, when we are not defined by our productive capacity, and so have time to absorb the reality around us in a different way – these are hard for our society to come to terms with."

In concluding his introductory speech Dr Williams returned to the fundamental Christian value of 'respect':

"The recovery of a full and rich sense of dignity at every age and in every condition is an imperative if we are serious about the respect we universally owe each other, that respect grounded for Christians in the divine image which is to be discerned in old and young alike."

The full text of the Archbishop’s Opening Speech can be found below, followed by his summing-up at the end of the debate.

Opening Speech

I am most grateful for the opportunity afforded to raise here the pressing and still largely ignored issue of the well-being of older citizens in our country.  I very much doubt whether I need in Your Lordships’ House to underline the fact that those over – say – 62 – are readily capable of making a contribution to society; and I think we may take as read declarations of personal interest in this regard; though I must also declare a specific interest as a patron or Vice-President of most of the voluntary agencies I shall be mentioning in the course of these remarks.  Yet the fundamental issue which has prompted this debate is the undoubted fact that we are becoming dangerously used to speaking and thinking of ‘an ageing population’ as a problem, a burden on public purse and private resources alike.  My hope for this debate is not so much to strengthen support for particular initiatives – though I shall be mentioning some – as to plead for a change in attitude that will appropriately recognise the dignity of older citizens, whatever their condition. 

As things stand, more than half the over-60 population are involved in some sort of formal and structured voluntary work; over half of the population believes that this is part of what they should aspire to in later life, and a third are willing to take part in informal volunteering.  These facts are of basic importance.  It means, quite simply, that a majority of the older population are ready to do what they can, unpaid, to support the fabric of society; they are doing exactly what we expect responsible citizens to do.  And a majority of us see this as a goal for our own later years. A conservative estimate of the value of the voluntary work already done in caring and family maintenance alone by the over-60s is in the region of £50 billion.

The first question which we must address, therefore, is what can be done by government and other agencies to harness most effectively this resource – not just as a way of solving problems that require such resources but as an affirmation of positive models of living for the older citizen.  If we live in a society that expects its older citizens to continue to support the fabric of their society and values them for doing so, we shall at least put to rest the damaging stereotype of older people as essentially passive in relation to society at large.  And that means in turn that we may stop seeing the older population as primarily ‘dependents’ on the goodwill of family or neighbourhood or state.  As we have seen, a majority of the population expects that there will be positive opportunities in their later years; we need to work with that perception and reinforce it strongly.  The Equality Act of 2010 has laid clear foundations in this respect, but more needs doing to build some solid embodiments of the principle.  For example, we need to ask how businesses not only prepare employees for such a future, but how they foster a continuing relationship with older citizens in their own exercise of corporate responsibility.  A vigorous dialogue between business and local advocacy groups is essential here.

It is only against such a background that we can usefully address the questions that do arise in relation to dependency.  It is of course a fact that advancing age is likely to decrease physical independence in various ways.  But rather than taking this as the core issue, we should see questions of dependency as basically about how our public policy and resourcing seeks to preserve both dignity and capacity among those who may be increasingly physically challenged but remain citizens capable of contributing vital things to the social fabric.  There is a lot to learn in this regard form the work done by disability rights and advocacy groups.  We must recognise that it is assumptions about the basically passive character of the older population that foster attitudes of contempt and exasperation, and ultimately create a climate in which abuse occurs.  Shockingly, Ruth Marks, the Older People’s Commissioner for Wales, estimates that one in four older people report one or another form of ‘elder abuse’, ranging from patronising and impatient behaviour to actual physical mistreatment.  Delivering Dignity, the February 2012 report of the Commission on Dignity in Care for Older People, has set out a comprehensive picture of what older citizens have a right to expect in terms of care and respect, with far-reaching implications as to the training of professional carers and care managers in and out of the NHS.  It recommends, for example, that the Government’s Nursing and Care Quality Forum should expand to include healthcare assistants and those working in care homes – and also, significantly, that the status of such care workers should be promoted by means of a College of Care.  One of the less recognised results of a dismissive attitude to the needs of older citizens receiving care is a view of carers for the elderly as a sort of proletariat among health and care professionals: there is a vicious circle at work here which needs dismantling.  It is worth mentioning here that some hospices, like the pioneering St Christopher’s, have blazed a trail in defining first-rate care standards

Needless to say, the same applies where we are talking about more than merely physical incapacity.  Dementia and depression are painfully familiar challenges – I would guess that a good many in this chamber have experience at first hand of caring for family members living with such conditions.  The Alzheimer’s Society, in co-operation with the Prime Minister’s Challenge on dementia, has an initiative aimed at creating ‘Dementia-Friendly Communities’, and more needs to be done once again in challenging those attitudes that lead to stigma and increased isolation.  And this returns us to the challenge of the Commission’s Report, which flags up the need for integrated care, drawing together home, hospital and care home: it is recommended that hospitals perform a full assessment of older people’s care needs before they are discharged, with a named staff member taking ongoing responsibility for liaison with patient and family.  And once again, many hospices have developed increasingly extensive and sophisticated ways of involving the wider community in their work, in a way that impacts constructively on general attitudes towards the older population. 

All of this also underlines the importance of intergenerational relationship.  As family structures become looser and more scattered geographically, it is vital that there be regular opportunities for interaction between younger and older people, not least between children and older citizens, whether through schools arranging visiting and befriending or through formal and informal oral history projects.  It is here that the contribution of churches and faith communities is particularly significant: in a good many contexts, these are simply the most robust and effective promoters both of intergenerational contact and formal or informal volunteering opportunities for older people.

My Lords, there is much more that could be said about specific questions and proposals; we have had two extremely important contributions in recent years to the overall policy landscape in the shape of the Dilnot report and the Delivering Dignity document to which I have already referred.  But let me in conclusion return to the matter of attitudes to the elderly.  A great deal of our culture is frenetically oriented towards youth – notably in entertainment and marketing.  This is understandable up to a point: people want to put down markers for the future as they see it.  But its effect can be both to ignore the present reality of responsible, active people in older life, who are still participants in society, not passengers – and to encourage younger people to forget that they are ageing themselves, and that they will be in need of positive and hopeful models for their own later years.  We tolerate a very eccentric view of the good life or the ideal life as one that can be lived only for a few years between, say, eighteen and forty.  The ‘extremes’ of human life, childhood and age, when we are not defined by our productive capacity, and so have time to absorb the reality around us in a different way – these are hard for our society to come to terms with.  Too often we want to rush children into pseudo-adulthood; too often we want older citizens either to go on as part of the productive machine as long as possible or to accept a marginal and humiliating status, tolerated but not valued, while we look impatiently at our watches, waiting for them to be ‘off our hands’.  The recovery of a full and rich sense of dignity at every age and in every condition is an imperative if we are serious about the respect we universally owe each other, that respect grounded for Christians in the divine image which is to be discerned in old and young alike.          

© Rowan Williams

Summing-up

My Lords, this has indeed been a very rich debate. I am profoundly grateful to all those in your Lordships’ House who have taken the trouble to be here today, not only on a Friday—and a Friday not long before Christmas—but on a Friday whose climatic conditions are clearly in evidence in the growing number of scarves and wraps appearing round the Benches.

It would be impossible to respond to all the immensely valuable points raised but I should like to touch briefly on four things that have emerged during the discussion today. One is a cluster of concerns around training and learning. The noble Lord, Lord Glasman, pointed out that we need a view of a lifelong vocation to transmit wisdom and that, therefore, older citizens are in need not just of training but of an opportunity to teach and to share what they have learnt. This House is of course a notable example of what can be achieved in that respect. For that reason, I do not want to sideline at all the importance of training. The noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, had a great deal to say about this earlier in the debate, and I made numerous notes because she covered so many significant points about the success of training for older people in making them more able to contribute what they can and in the development of business models for older people, as well as many other things.

Behind that lies a deeper question about the authority that we accord to older people in our society. I use the word “authority” advisedly because, although it is not a comfortable word in our society today, it is one that has some real traction when we begin to think about how we learn and how we orient ourselves. Virtually every speaker today has, in effect, assumed that we can properly speak of an authority of experience that resides in our older citizens—an authority that we need to pay attention to, value and nurture appropriately.

A second group of issues that has come up has already been flagged by the Minister in her response, and that is to do with the fact that it is of course impossible to generalise about older citizens. Each one is an individual and many belong to groups which have distinctive needs and concerns. Our attention has been drawn in several contexts today to those older citizens who belong to a category of persons for whom ageing brings extra difficulties—whose condition is compounded by disability, by circumstances of ethnic background and community, or by their status as prisoners. I was very glad that the noble Lord, Lord Ramsbotham, had such detailed evidence to submit to us on the still unresolved issues around ageing prisoners. And of course, as the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, pointed out, there are questions arising around the needs of older LGBT people.

Our response to older citizens has to be sensitive, varied and flexible. It is important, as many noble Lords have pointed out today, to bear in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all solution to these questions. What we need is a fundamental change of attitude which expresses itself in an imaginative, sympathetic response to the particular needs of communities and individuals.

A couple of very specific questions were put by, among others, the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, and the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, about the role of the clergy. The role of chaplains in healthcare institutions is crucial both in drawing attention to the needs of older citizens and in gathering and galvanising volunteers. That they should also have a role in identifying those deserving of public recognition in some way is, if I may pick up the point made by the noble Lord, Lord Cormack, something that I would want to take away with some enthusiasm.

As to retirements ages, I feel I am not in a very good position to speak, being on the edge of leaving office, but I hear what is said and I believe there is a very significant area of concern for many of our churches, not least the Church of England, in the way in which we perhaps too readily refuse to consider and to respond to what I called earlier the authority of those who are older and experienced.

Fourthly, I want simply to touch on the remarks made by the noble Baroness, Lady Andrews, about the need for a protocol for all care institutions, in which principles of respect and attention are clearly set out. I believe this to be at the very heart of all our discussions today and of any future policies. We need clarity and a sense of what people—as I believe I said in my opening remarks—know is owed to them as citizens and human beings. That is the essence of whatever emerges from today in terms of more focused policy proposals and initiatives.

Running through my head in much of the discussion has been one of the most haunting prayers in scripture: “Do not forsake me when I am old and grey-headed”. It is a prayer addressed to the creator but it could very well be addressed by older citizens to their fellow citizens. We are urged not to forget, to run away from, to despise or to undervalue those to whom we are bound in common citizenship and humanity.

Finally, I want to express my deep personal gratitude for all the embarrassingly undeserved things that have been said more personally in the course of this debate. I want to put them in the context of the remarks right at the beginning of the debate from the noble Baroness, Lady Trumpington. On my calculation, she has lived through the reigns of nine or 10 Archbishops of Canterbury and must have a view of archbishops as simply butterflies who come for a day and disappear.

As a butterfly happily contemplating mutating into a caterpillar very shortly, I am very glad indeed to acknowledge my debt to fellow Members of your Lordships’ House for many years of unbroken stimulus, companionship, challenge and inspiration.

© Rowan Williams 2012

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