Elderly People: Abuse

Lord Griffiths of Burry Port Excerpts

Wednesday 14th May 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Griffiths of Burry Port (Lab)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, for giving us this opportunity—albeit at such a late hour—to exchange at least some views on what is an increasingly important subject for us all.

The community where I have responsibilities has a safeguarding policy, but we do not limit it to creating a safe environment for children; we also look at vulnerable adults in the remit of our policy. Perhaps what I predominantly want to say in the short speech that I will make is how important it is to avoid turning a safeguarding policy into a mechanistic exercise. Sometimes one suspects that it safeguards the interests of the institution against potential litigation, rather than creating a safe environment for children or the vulnerable elderly, which ought to be our concern. That is why, in implementing our policy, we try hard to have adequate training across the board and, in various teaching situations, to undergird the requirements of the policy with emotive as well as intellectual consideration.

It is important to create communities of care and for people to encourage each other to look out for each other. As the noble Baroness, Lady Cumberlege, properly said, apart from all the institutional examples of abuse of the elderly, which we know only too well from the media in recent days, people whom we know very well can suddenly show evidence of coming under stress and strain and, when we investigate it, it turns out to be a result of abuse for financial, psychological or other reasons in their domestic scene. We have to attune ourselves to identifying the signals that will allow us to follow through caringly and compassionately on such people when we meet them.

Rather than go into statistical or story-telling mode about this—there is plenty of evidence about it—for me it is simply that, whatever we decide and wherever this debate goes, this issue is not going to go away. It will increase. It is like the environmental debate: all the evidence is there but we do not do much. In the case of the elderly in our community, all the evidence is there but we are very tardy at doing much. I welcome the fact that statutory provision is now available to ensure regulation of certain activities in certain places, but that is very difficult in the domestic scene.

We try to find ways of helping each other to create a culture within which people are alerted to the needs of other people. This Parliament cannot do that. It can do its statutory business but somehow there is a cultural job to do, building an ethos in which people look out for each other and enriching society at a time when we run our affairs with increasing individualism. I simply want to throw that in. I had not expected to be the second speaker in the debate and therefore to be catapulted into making a national statement on all this. However, in all the evidence that is going to come forward, I hope that the undergirding or surrounding of the issue by human qualities of care and sharing is never forgotten or lost from view.