Older People: Their Place and Contribution in Society

Lord Glasman Excerpts

Friday 14th December 2012 Lords Chamber

[Lord Glasman]

My Lords, I echo the sentiments of the House in honouring the most reverend Primate for the grace, intelligence and complexity that he has brought to public life. I certainly express my personal, very great debt for the concept of paradox that he brought to me—that tradition is necessary for modernity, that faith will play a central role in the fulfilment of citizenship and, above all, that we find individual fulfilment through our relationships. These are absolutely necessary aspects of the changes that we need to make in the way that we understand the world.

In terms of this debate, I know that the most reverend Primate is now going to re-enter academic life, so I shall gently remind him what it is like. I want to talk about the slight concern that I have with the thinness of the concept of resource. When we think of human beings in terms of human resources, we diminish them in almost every case. When we think of older people, we think of an inheritance. We think of something that constitutes us that is not simply a resource to be used but something that is part of us. In that spirit, I should like to talk about one very practical aspect of how we have to change our conceptualisation of older people, and that is by renewing the idea of vocation. We have an imminent problem, which could be viewed as a resource problem. When we have a resource problem, what do we do? We import people and try to do some training.

I should like to introduce a new concept to the House. We talk about lifelong learning; I would say, in honour of what the most reverend Primate has taught me, that we have to talk about lifelong teaching. It is the partner to lifelong learning, and the greatest degree of neglect that we show older people is when we cut them off from their teaching role in society. A tragedy that is yet to be redeemed in our society is the abandonment of the wisdom, the skills and, above all, the experience of old people and the virtues which they still have and which we desperately need. It may be the case that my generation and generations younger than mine have neglected skill, virtue, honour, tenacity and fidelity in the workplace, but older people still have an echo of that, and it is a virtue that young people have to relearn. Therefore, when we think of vocation and of renewing skills, it is absolutely essential that we bring older people back into teaching and passing on the skills that need to be renewed.

Two very good ideas have been raised today. One was put forward by the noble Baroness, Lady Masham, and concerned the chaplaincy. This is a much neglected area. The University of Cambridge is a very effective, modern institution, and one reason that it is a modern institution is that it has preserved its traditions, its institutions and its relationality. One of the key ways it has done that is through the chaplaincies. The chaplaincies within the colleges are not an irrelevant luxury; they are not to be subsumed within the human resource diktats of student retention and progression. They are a way in which the colleges have retained humanity and a set of relationships.

The hospital idea—that the chaplaincy should honour humanity and always oppose neglect and abuse—is fantastic. This is a classic way in which tradition and modernity meet. However, to go further, we have to reconceptualise our skills so that we view the old as a resource, certainly, but also as a constitutive part of the way that we shape the future. On progression, while you hear of a professional foul, you never hear of a vocational foul. It is an important addition that old people should be put in positions of status and power.

When I first came into this House I was amused by the concept of elevation and my children made a lot of jokes about it. However, I have been truly elevated by the company here; by older people having status, power and authority. It is very rare in the whole realm to have institutions where older people are heard, but this is one of them. In this very important debate, I urge that we take practical steps to reintegrate older people into the training of the young. The primary contribution that faith makes to citizenship at the moment is that, unlike in many secular institutions, there is still an honouring of the elder in the faith tradition. We can learn from that and return it into the way we train people in vocation so that the abandoned workers of the past three decades, such as shipbuilders, can finally be given status and honour in reconstituting the common good, not the least part of which is intergenerational.

One of the great problems that we have is the segmentation of ages. We know that Christmas is coming; I do not want to rehearse the data about the older people with children and family who will be alone. This is heartbreaking in itself but, as the most reverend Primate said earlier, it is really about marketing being segmented according to age. However, genuine goodness always brings people of different ages together in relationship—not through a sense of moral obligation but through learning and growing. That is not only through prayer and eating together, it is through the other practices of the working life.

In considering that beautiful phrase of calling our attention to the place and contribution of older people, we must look at how the older generation are going to constitute the flourishing of the young. We cannot deal with the issues of the young without honouring the old and bringing them into relationship with the young to pass on the traditions which they hold.