Older People: Their Place and Contribution in Society

Lord Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[The Lord Bishop of St Edmundsbury and Ipswich]

My Lords, as so many have said, I am grateful to the most reverend Primate the Archbishop of Canterbury for securing this take note debate. In this, his last appearance in your Lordships’ House as Archbishop, it is right that I express before your Lordships from these Benches the very highest appreciation of his ministry over these past 10 years. We in the House of Bishops have been blessed—a word that I use very deliberately—by a person of extraordinary intellect and ability but with a rare ability to combine that with a warmth of character and to lead by example in the depth of his spirituality. Our debt to him is immeasurable.

The Archbishop has invited a wide-ranging debate, and indeed the subject can only invite that. I am glad that he attempted to give some definition of what we mean by “older”. I was looking forward to referring to him in this debate as my elder and better but, much to my chagrin, I can refer to him only as my better—he is younger than me by six months.

Over 36 years of ministry in the Anglican church—like the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, in his church ministry—I have seen some extraordinary changes in the attitude to the place of older people in society and in the support of the elderly. As the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, said, human beings are not machines and through many factors the ability to function in society in later years is never uniform. As your Lordships have already heard, there are increasing numbers of people able to have a good quality of life at a later age than previous generations have known.

This fact has been signalled for a good many years now. In my diocese, we are very fortunate to have as a lay canon emeritus the author and man of letters Ronald Blythe. He celebrated his 90th birthday this year. He is still writing, still promoting literary giants of previous generations who he fears might be forgotten and still producing a lyrical weekly column for the Church Times. I mention him not only as an example of a distinguished contribution made by an older person to society, but because of an extraordinarily prophetic essay he wrote about old age, which is perhaps all the more remarkable because he wrote it when he was in his 50s. In that essay, he drew attention to the phenomenon of a much larger population of older people and how that was a more recent development than perhaps we allowed.

What has always stuck in my mind from that work was a quotation he used from Paul Tournier, a Swiss medical practitioner, philosopher and theologian who wrote:

“I have come to the conclusion that there is one essential, profound, underlying problem, and it is that the old are unloved. They do not feel themselves to be loved, and too many people treat them with indifference and seek no contact with them ... I think of the multitudes of retired people who hold aloof, who do know that people are concerned that they should have, as we say, decent living conditions, but who know that no personal interest is being taken in them”.

I think that remark reflects what the noble Lord, Lord Griffiths, said earlier about that respect, knowledge of self, care and network of history that we have with other people that make you feel that you are still part of life and society. Of course, when you hear something like that, you say, “Can it be true?”. You can immediately think of plenty of examples where it is not. I imagine that for most noble Lords it is not true, but those involved in the pastoral ministry of clergy know only too often of where it is the case.

Times have changed, I am relieved to say, and standards in the care of the frail elderly have improved out of all recognition in my lifetime. Pastoral ministry in parishes takes you into many such establishments. I ministered in one populous north-east parish near the coast at Tyneside. At least 10 care homes were established there. I watched the change from places which sat people all day in a large circle in a day room to the introduction of a state-of-the-art new care home, which specialised in dementia care. The quality of care rose, as did the desire to show that compassion which has been the subject of concern recently for the nursing profession. Standards are rising, but there is still a big gap between the best and the worst, and there is still an issue that the more personal financial resources you have, the better the quality of care you can access. It remains true that there is something of a postcode lottery about the availability of places of care with high standards.

The churches, too, have to look to themselves as to exactly what they are willing to provide and can do at a time when we know that there will be falling numbers of available full-time clergy. For a time, I worked with a person who owned some very good care homes. He was determined to try to improve the quality of spiritual care in them and recognised that there was so much more to do. It was surprising how difficult it was to find wider support, although I am glad that eventually a church institute took up his offer of funding research into the subject.

A systematic approach to thinking about the implications by statutory agencies does happen, I acknowledge, but it can be patchy. Some years ago, I went to an excellent conference which took on board all the implications for our society of an ageing population: the infrastructure that would be needed, the pension question and the ability of a smaller working population to provide the necessary resources. The point was made that we were rapidly approaching the point where 50% of our society would be over 50. It was a forward-looking conference that talked of many things we now grapple with: the need to raise the retirement age and the very positive approach to encouraging significant contributions, paid and unpaid, from people later in life. The trouble is that all that was organised by a regional development agency that no longer exists, and there is no trace from the websites that I can see that that sort of joined-up thinking has been carried on.

The churches can do bits that help bring that together. I think of one initiative by local churches that invited numerous agencies that provided support or opportunities for volunteering for older people to meet in one place. They then invited everyone they knew over a certain age to meet them and to go around in groups—speed dating, so to speak. It was amazing that there was no joined-up thinking between those groups. Some of the offers were being duplicated where they could have provided a more efficient service in different areas. There is much to be done.

Accessing healthcare increases in later years, of course, but the multidisciplinary approach to people who develop a series of needs can be patchy. I do not want to fall into the trap, already referred to, of thinking of older people as a group with problems or as a problem. Of all institutions, as we have heard, the church should know best about the extraordinarily valuable contribution that older people make.

Let me tell the House of one in my diocese. A group of Christians got together to try to provide a therapeutic community for young women who had become addicted to drugs, which frequently led to sexual exploitation. The young women can access a certain amount of care and be provided with a certain amount of rehabilitation, but that can be maintained only if they are given support following the end of that course of rehabilitation. Frequently, that does not happen. They go back to their old haunts and contacts and fall back into that vicious cycle of addiction that leads to exploitation. The vision is to provide a therapeutic community that helps them back into society.

The main person behind this vision is a retired person who is giving countless hours. The place that the group is hoping to turn into the community needs a lot of physical labour and refurbishment, and most of that is being provided by retired people with the necessary skills. It is an extraordinary example of the older generation providing care for the younger. That is being repeated time and again throughout this country, and I hope this debate helps to raise it above the radar. It has not been mentioned yet, but this year we have had the finest example of all of an older person serving this nation: Her Majesty the Queen. If she is not an example to inspire, who is?

I hope that the tenor of this debate helps to make the gloomy prognostication made by Tournier in the late 1970s lack a certain currency and that we can find the way to offer love and opportunity to older people. I thank the most reverend Primate for introducing this debate.