Care Services: Elderly People

Lord Roberts of Llandudno Excerpts

Wednesday 6th March 2013 Grand Committee

[Lord Roberts of Llandudno]

My Lords, I also appreciate the opportunity to take part in this debate. Other noble Lords have much more expertise than I have, but I put my finger very gently into the water because this is something I experience. I am a Methodist minister and all my life I have been involved in the care of older people. I look now in my daily newspaper at the births, marriages and deaths, and whereas some years ago the majority of people died in their 60s and 70s, now we have them at 80, 90 or touching 100. This has changed the whole atmosphere and situation that we need to come to terms with.

In rural areas particularly these needs are very acute. A village community will support a person in that village. That person will feel part of that community. Some have lived there all their lives. They know the village and the people around them. Then suddenly everything has changed. I can think of a mixture of places where there were once shops. One village at the end of the war had 29 shops but has no shops now. If you do not have a car, you cannot get away to get your shopping. You cannot get to the post office now, but in any case the way pensions are paid has changed. The bakery has gone. We used to enjoy the bakery and friends of mine ran it. We had five chapels in the area and now four of them have closed and the village church is struggling. The choirs and bands that we used to have belong to yesterday. I did not think that I would ever support the case for keeping pubs open—Methodist ministers do not do that usually—but every week 16 pubs close. They, like the chapel or the church, were a vital part of the community where people could meet, but that is no longer the case. The doctor’s twice-weekly surgery is no more. Two banks used to come on a Friday morning. The banks do not come any more. In many cases, the small neighbouring hospital is already closed and in other places there is great anxiety because the hospital is under threat of closure. In Wales health is devolved, and I wonder whether we could not somehow relocate some of the specialist services that do not need as big a back-up as others, such as rheumatology or dialysis, so that those services would be the core that would justify the existence of that hospital which could then be involved in wider care in that community. I know the arguments for big hospitals. They are great arguments, but families have to travel.

In rural areas, bus services have been decimated. Your friends are elderly and cannot travel very far. We have these problems. In North Wales, we have problems with hospital closures. I ask that people think about whether we can do something in order to have beds available near the community from which that person comes. My mother-in-law kept the local bus service going. She lived in a village four miles from where I live. I used to offer her a lift home when she was 88. She would say, “I’m not having a lift with you. I’m the only passenger on the bus, so I’ve got to keep going on it”, but when she went, the service went as well.

Every part of the community is weakened by the change in lifestyle and so on, especially for older people. There must be intervention to improve the quality of life, the well-being, of the individual. The person needs to feel safe and comfortable in his or her local village. When you retire—I have experienced this, as have some other noble Lords in the Committee—what information do you get? You get information about pensions, but do you get an information pack about the services available in the local community and about how you will get help if you are in urgent need? Some of our organisations do this, but those who retire should be given not only financial information but community information about bus services and so on, if there are any, and volunteer organisations. I must not overstep the mark here all the time, but the best thing we have in Wales and the rest of the UK is the free bus service for elderly people. It has kept routes going. We have services that we must support, but there are ways, not always financial, in which we can help our older people.