Elderly People: Abuse

Baroness Greengross Excerpts

Wednesday 14th May 2014 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Greengross (CB)]

My Lords, the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, has given us the opportunity to consider a whole range of abuses of elderly people. In my very short time, I will concentrate on the rather hidden abuse of people in the community. Unfortunately, as we learnt from the Health and Social Care Information Centre, in just one year—2013—there was a 4% rise in cases of alleged abuse referred for investigation. Sadly, the hidden abuse is very likely not to be referred at all. I have been involved in this issue for many years and helped to establish Action on Elder Abuse because nobody took these issues as seriously as they need to be taken. I am really appalled that we still have to take into account the fact that most of this sort of community-based hidden abuse is not understood or reported.

There are reasons for this. An elderly woman, a mother, who is smashed up by her son will not report it because that makes her seem a very inadequate mother to produce that sort of son. There are other reasons, too. For example, a lot of elder abuse is the result of a whole history of domestic violence in a family that continues into the old age of one member of that family. Sometimes it is a question of revenge, such as for a daughter who was abused in some way in childhood by her father. There are other examples. There is a lot of fraud, which personalised budgets and choice can in fact increase very easily. It is very simple to extract money from benefits or pensions from somebody who is elderly, frail and confused.

Abuse is very hard to detect if a confused elderly person is cared for by a family who provide the basics of food and drink but then shut the door and leave that person in a room alone without any real contact with other human beings. We know that, worse, it is not difficult to use the personalised money they receive for the family’s other needs. I agree with the noble Baroness, Lady Barker, about deficiencies in the law in this country. I have also tried to argue with the noble Earl that some sort of easier method of gaining entry to someone’s home if there is a suspicion of abuse is needed because it is extremely difficult to detect what is going on if you wait until it is publicly recognised. Social workers—very specialist ones—need some way of investigating what is going on.

We know that the elderly people most likely to need care in their homes very often suffer from dementia. The noble Lord, Lord Turnberg, said how difficult it is to care for many years for somebody who has dementia and can be aggressive and difficult. People just do not always have the stamina to continue year after year doing that. We must do something to make sure that these people are better cared for and supported in their task.