Not Dead Yet: A Manifesto for Old Age. Julia Neuberger
Читать онлайн книгу.
But those at the opposite end of the debate are not setting an example either. A huge number of public sector workers believe they have the right – or at least they exercise this opportunity – to take early retirement at 55. Many people are forced to retire early, admittedly on pretty well near a full pension, because of reorganization after reorganization, especially in the NHS. But the idea that we can leave a job and get a full pension at 55 as a teacher, a community nurse, a hospital nurse, when society is crying out for more people with real experience to do these jobs, is absurd. Yet any attempt government makes to convince public sector workers to stay longer, to forego their very generous pension rights – which were once seen as a compensation for not earning so well when working, which is less true now – has been met with a truculent refusal to negotiate.
There must be a better way forward, given the evidence that many older people find life more satisfying if they are still working. The 55-year-old teachers, social workers and nurses might be persuaded to work to 60 or 65, or longer if possible, if they could get a six-month sabbatical on full pay at 55. Sabbaticals are good for people, whereas retirement seems less beneficial than people used to think. They could learn something new, travel, see people doing their kind of work somewhere where they do it quite differently, and then come back and work at least another three to five years. It would save the public purse considerably in terms of training new people who would also expect to retire at 55. It would keep very experienced people in the workforce. But for those who feel burned out by the constant changes, or just worn out with dealing with difficult, inattentive children in the classroom, it would refresh them and excite them.
Surely before we accept the public sector’s refusal to work longer, despite the obvious need, as well as the benefits to the workers involved, we should try more of a carrot approach. Indeed, those older people who go on grown-up ‘gap years’ are obviously fulfilled by it, learn a lot, and have much to teach the rest of us, if only we would let them.
There is a proposal that older drivers should be given cognitive tests every five years to retain their driving licence, because studies have indicated that older drivers are more likely to be involved in accidents. At the moment motorists aged 70 or more have to report any medical condition which may affect their ability to drive. When this was first reported, the Times had an online debate, and some of the responses make appalling reading. ‘The elderly are dangerous enough as pedestrians without letting them drive cars!’ wrote Simon Moss of Kiev in the Ukraine. ‘The cognitive tests … look pretty ridiculous too. A five year old or a drunk could easily pass them. Wouldn’t an eye text be more relevant? Or a test of reaction times? Or would that be more politically incorrect?’15 Yet all the evidence suggests younger drivers cause far more accidents than older ones, though clearly we could all agree that older drivers with cognitive or visual impairments should not be driving. The point is not the age, it’s the condition that counts.
Volunteering
Huge numbers of volunteers, in all sorts of sectors of society, are in fact ‘older people’. About a third of us in Britain volunteer regularly, though some of that may be extremely infrequently. Many organizations rely heavily on older people to make their activities work, whether it is helping schools with reading or helping in care homes – in some care homes the average age of the volunteers is higher than that of the residents. Large numbers of older people volunteer at the National Trust – I met a National Trust volunteer in her eighties who had become one of the country’s leading experts in eighteenth-century furniture polishing. There are older volunteers in hospitals, working on anything from shopping trolleys to libraries, from showing people around to helping people who have mobility difficulties.
There has been a range of government schemes to encourage older people into volunteering, from the Experience Corps, which has sadly gone into abeyance, more or less, and was perceived to be unsuccessful by government, to Volunteering in the Third Age (VITA), and enormously effective operations run by charities like Help the Aged, Age Concern and CSV. But government has been obsessed with younger people volunteering – perhaps understandably – and has therefore mistakenly failed to keep a focus on older people becoming volunteers. The government can’t tell anyone, young or old, what to do, but financial support for older people volunteering – and organizing volunteering doesn’t come free – makes a huge difference to how older people feel, and to what they provide for the wider population. It also means they require less healthcare and general support if they are being active and feel useful.
The major focus of the government agenda on volunteering is on younger people, and particular groups of socially excluded people, those without educational qualifications, or with disabilities and long-term life-limiting illnesses, and members of black and minority ethnic communities, so older people do not always figure. Yet their contribution is vast: the VITA project’s final report in 2007 looked at 477 organizations, involving a total of 1.3 million volunteers, two thirds of them over 50.16 Older people are also disproportionately involved in the delivery of care to other older people.
One of the reasons they do it is to give them a reason for getting out of bed in the morning. The other benefits to the volunteers are obvious: enjoyment, health, a structure for the day, active participation in local communities, increased confidence and new experiences. The organizations that use them also gain, and so does society, from their long experience and skills, the ability to make connections between services and their users.
Take Roger Withers, for example.17 He spends his time as a befriender at a local day centre at the age of 81 and eleven years after the death of his wife. Or Peggy Crudace, 85, who lives in a high rise block in Newcastle, which has within it a community flat jointly owned by social services and Community Service Volunteers. Peggy’s ‘commitment to involving people is one of the reasons the community flat is so successful. When she is not acting as treasurer, and taking care of the book-keeping, she is helping with the lunches, baking cakes, buns and tarts, organizing raffles, going to art classes, making decorated birthday and Christmas cards and even abseiling when she has the chance.’18
Or Ted Howell, 80, who was told by his wife who was already volunteering as a befriender ‘not to be a slouch’. He takes people to hospital in wheelchairs, takes them shopping or to the hairdresser, and does anything else with them they want. Like so many, Ted is downbeat about what he does: ‘It drives me out of bed … it can be a pain in the backside,’ he says. ‘But it gets me to meet some very nice people.’
WRVS, well known for its work with older people, has suggested that we designate Christmas Day as ‘Independence Day’ for older people, in their honour, and, second, that we use the 3.5 million years of experience WRVS’s own volunteers have between them to help others have a stress-free Christmas. To do that, they set up WiseLine at Christmas 2007, by both phone and email, to advise on everything from keeping the peace in families to present buying, cooking for a variety of different diets to solving the mysteries of fairy lights that do not function.
In their press pack, they highlighted a Liverpool volunteer called Maria who suggested having diversions at hand when tempers look as if they might get heated, and Shirley from Devon, 72, who has volunteered for 18 years and has just stopped running the lunch club which feeds up to 100 people each week – including people whom the local GPs beg them to take on because of loneliness, depression and simply a lack of things to do. And they do Christmas lunch as well.
But her most important point was about how you can still function as you get older:
When it comes to ageing, I think some people think that the brain stops when the legs don’t work so well, but if people get out and stay active, it keeps them engaged. People in their eighties can use email. One of our ladies was given a laptop by her grandson for her 90th. She went to computer classes and used it to email him in Australia, and to tell me when she could not attend or start her car!