Local councils that cut social care will only push up costs in longer term

WRVS today responded to the House of Commons Health Select Committee report’s conclusions that a funding gap remains for providing social care.

The evidence is clear that if local councils do choose to move more older people out of social care support in the next year they will only push up costs in the longer term.

The committee are right to commend the stronger lead that ministers have given to expand joint working between the health service and local government and WRVS will closely monitoring how local decision makers deliver on this objective.

However, it is clear that we need real accountability at local level. We and others will also be asking ministers to report back at a national level on the picture that is emerging across the country.”

Further info on the Health Select Committee here www.parliament.uk/healthcom

Social care: The crunch beckons

We are days away from the Government’s spending review and a potential radical recasting of the provision of social care across England and Wales.

I’ve spoken to many people who feel that the system is not working for them and that their family members fall between hospital care and local council social services. We need to get better at anticipating the health and well being needs of older people, rather than patching individuals up when their health has deteriorated to the extent that they need hospital admission.

I think that a good place to start would be planning services by looking at peoples’ lives as a whole, such as bereavement or the loss of mobility. Many of WRVS’ services provide an ongoing connection with older peoples’ lives and allow us to detect changes in individuals’ mood, physical health or wider circumstances that may impact on their health and well-being weeks or months later. Central to our model of care is the deployment of our volunteers, who use their local insights to make the delivery of this care personalised and sensitive to individual needs and circumstances.

Local decision makers, such as councils and local authorities, now need to make the investment in services and support for people with low care needs, given the growing evidence that these services can make a substantial difference in avoiding or delaying major health problems. The House of Commons Health select committee concluded that the existing system of social care is unfair to carers; too variable and failed to sufficiently prevent or delay ill-health.

There are encouraging signs that ministers may wish to get to grips with this problem . At the Conservative Conference, the Health Secretary announced that the National Health Service (NHS) would be given responsibility for the care of people within thirty days of their discharge from hospital and this was backed by an extra £70 million pounds. The NHS White Paper said that the existing powers to encourage joint working between local authorities and the NHS would be simplified and that local authorities would be given a new duty to promote public health.

But these developments are taking place at the same time as councils are expecting to have to make big cuts in their care budgets. Most councils have already restricted their services for people with critical or substantial care needs and we are already hearing that councils across the country are tightening the criteria they use to decide who gets care.

Some key players within social care world have recognised that major new strategic thinking is required in order to avoid and have talked of a recasting of provision rather than crude attempts at retrenchment. The Local Government Association has called for a range of local decision makers to work more closely together to focus on ‘upstream’ prevention.

I hope that ministers will clearly communicate their level of ambition about the expansion of preventative care to health and social care commissioners. This is what WRVS thinks that ministers could do now:

• the Department of Health could direct the release of further resources from the NHS budget to pay for preventative services, reinforcing the point that better health does not necessarily require NHS delivery
• Ministers could issue stronger central guidance emphasising the value of preventative care services and that these should be a major focus for joint working arrangements
• they could amend the criteria that local authorities use to decide who receive services by specifying that some people need support to prevent them deteriorating later in life. 

Older Scots top fears are loneliness and care homes but it doesn’t have to be that way

Sometimes, in policy work, its a little tiring to have to constantly prove and reprove empirically what everyone already knows to be the case but in the name of evidence-based policy we keep on going. That's why, for me anyway, the results of a recent WRVS survey on what Scottish older people wanted out of support services, now and in the future, held few surprises. The good thing is that its more proof of what they do want that can be used to back up our efforts to make sure they can get it. Oh, and having it covered on BBC Radio Scotland and in the Scottish Daily Express and in the Herald, Scotland's primo left-of-centre broadsheet, was pretty gratifying too! You can read a short summary and analysis here and the news story here.

"Boom, Boom Boom, Boom, I'm Gonna Turn 65!"

The Department of Work and Pensions this week released figures showing that, surprise surprise, we're set for a huge rise in pensioners over the next couple of years as 1946/47s coterie of 'baby-boomers' turn 65. By the way, as far as I can see, depending on which set of stats one is looking at; the baby boomer generation stretches from the point at which Operation Barbarossa saw the Nazi's invade Russia (1941) to the beginning of the inexorable decline in quality of the Rolling Stones' output in the early 1970s, which I find a bit wierd, I thought a 'generation' was about 20 years long. Anyway, 'whatever', as folk say nowadays. These new stats, while interesting, are of limited use since we have known about the huge rise in the population of older people for years now. What's more interesting is what we are going to do about it. I've blogged about that too much to repeat myself again - prevention is better than cure and volunteering keeps you fit and healthy is all I'll say this time - but if you check out past blogs you'll get the idea. Enjoy!

To be eligible or not to be eligible, that is the question

I was conducting some online research the other day about how Scottish local authorities go about offering free personal care and social care more broadly to older people. By the way, it's important to remember that those two things are not synonymous, the former is much more about the real personal stuff like hygiene, dressing and mobility whereas the latter can be about things like transport and shopping. Anyway, to cut a very long story short, basing their approach on Scottish Government (SG) guidance - newly fashioned in 2009 after lots of consultation - all local authorities use eligibility criteria to determine who gets services. Because resources are limited, those who are most at critical or substantial risk of harm are prioritised to recieve services. That might be logical and fair just now but, as WRVS has pointed out, unless we, as a society, can start to move towards preventative services which mean there are progressively less and less people at that level of risk, we're very soon going to crash mightily into the buffers of unaffordability, with casualties all round.

To be fair to both Scottish central and local government they all seem committed to the idea of 'adopting a strong preventative approach to help avoid rising levels of need' (that's a direct quite from the SG guidance) but it appears that limited resources mean, in fact, that few local authorities if any can commit to providing the extensive preventative services that they would ideally like to. Reading the local authority responses to the the 2009 consultation, some of them seem very pro-prevention indeed. Unfortunately, reviewing their eligibility criteria in 2010, these two examples illustrate the spectrum of the way they are apparently obliged to function (I will spare their blushes and let them remain anonymous):

‘The Health and Social Care Department assessment prioritises assistance to those whose needs have been assessed as being within the Critical and Substantial categories. People whose needs have been assessed in Moderate or Low categories may (my italics) receive help to maintain or develop abilities or to prevent further deterioration.’

‘LOW – you or others are at low risk of harm or loss of independence. For these needs, we will not (my italics) provide services. However, we will offer advice and information about alternative sources of support.’

Let's be clear, I'm not saying this is all local authorities' fault. What I am saying is that, sooner or later, some radical funding decisions need to be made about what money goes to which bit of the public sector and to the voluntary and private sector partners that work with it. With that in mind, here's a telling quote for you from the House of Commons Health Committee Report on NHS Continuing Care from way back in 2005:

“The question of what is health and what is social care is one to which we can find no satisfactory answer, and which our witnesses were similarly unable to explain in meaningful terms."

It only takes a little dot-joining to detect the radical solution that statement might be taken to imply but I'll let you work that one out for yourselves. Happy figuring!

Preventative Services

Yes, OK, it's a Scotland-related blog again but WRVS's take on the need to shift resources and money away from acute health care and residential care and towards community-based preventative services for older people in Scotland holds good for England and Wales. The point is this: whilst there will always be a need for services that deal with problems after they arise, the more we can grow services that stop preventable problems from arising in the first place, the better lives older people will lead. And there's now a sizeable body of evidence that preventative services are cost efficient, with the potential to save the public purse millions of pounds. That's what's likely to be of most interest to the Finance Committee of the Scottish Parliament, to whose inquiry on prevenative spending this submission by WRVS was made.

It's Big, it's Societal, it's the Big Society!

It's here! The Big Society is here! Well, the announcement is anyway and the Big Society Bank and the four 'vanguard sites' across England, for, lest we forget, the Big Society is England-specific as the policy areas it is connected to are devolved to the Scottish Parliament and to the Welsh Assembly. On that note, it will be interesting to see what happens when someone in England cooks up a proposal to somehow bring a reserved issue into the Big Society Big Top but for now it's "Cry 'Big Society for Harry, England, and Saint George!"

David Cameron has pretty much characterised the Big Society as the legacy of his time in office so he needs it to work. Given it can only work if 'the people' make it work I admire his faith. With 53,000 volunteers WRVS knows a thing or two about supporting people to do things for themselves. So, will it work? Well, I am not an apologist for any political party but let's first put to bed the myth that the Big Society is about a) replacing paid positions with volunteers and b) dismantling the welfare state and leaving us all to fend for ourselves. It's just not. Voluntary action, of whatever kind, is never and will never be engaged effectively if people feel they are being obliged to act as part of some mass-dumping-of-public-services exercise by a government who sees community action or third sector groups as some sort of surrogate private sector, whose fangs are being let loose on Nye Bevan's baby because it's leaders couldn't get International Megacorp Plc to savage it sufficiently. Volunteers, whether engaged formally in organisations like WRVS or informally as community activists, may act out of necessity but that doesn't mean they're a bunch of easily-fooled suckers who are going to form a new phalanx of amateur social workers or community nurses as, meanwhile, the dole lines lengthen. Nor does it mean they're a secret army of laissez-faire right wingers eager to bring services into their own personal private sphere. The third sector, particularly in local communities, has always grown into the gaps in UK society because no-one else was doing anything about issue X or problem Y. It is also no longer the case that the third sector is made up solely of volunteers. WRVS has over 2000 staff itself. In other words the Big Society is not about throwing people into the unemployment bin. OK, OK, I can see that if you sweep away the local public-sector-provided nursery then you have a gap and it's that kind of thing that some people fear but I have to say that, leaving the example of nurseries as just that, an example, it's not clear to me either a) that this (i.e. a massive cull of essential services) will inevitably happen or b) just why we have ended up thinking the state should provide all the things that it currently does, even though many of them are great and I love 'em. But many isn't all. And besides, if you look at the 'vanguard areas' there's stuff in there about running a local pub and setting up bus services; both usually private sector ventures. In fact I am not aware that any of the mainstream political parties still tout the idea of some sort of anti-third sector, anti-charity, socialist, state-must-provide-all model and they haven't for decades now. What I do know is that it is simply nonsensical to suggest that the talents, abilities, enthusiasm creativity, invention and drive of 'ordinary people' (oh, save us from that term of reference!) should be suppressed because 'the state does that'. What counts is the outcome, not the method. Look at it this way; if the Big Society boozer is crap, no-one's going to drink in it are they? Likewise, the idea, even in the current financial mess we're in, that the state will withdraw public services en masse and leave vast deserts of need is fatuous. Even people who traditionally vote Tory rely on such services to the extent that they'll feel the bite and shout about it. Cameron wants a second term without the Lib Dems, he can't afford to drop votes anywhere.

I think the Big Society will work. I've worked in the third sector for 15 years, several of which I spent as a community development worker with small local groups. I think people are marvellous and will always surprise you. In fact, if I have a criticism of the initiative it's really only that the way it's been presented means you'd be forgiven for thinking we haven't got an extensive, vibrant third sector across England already, because we have, as NCVO will tell you. The Big Society initiative may help that sector make an even greater contribution to England but just as it's not going to replace the public sector, it's not going to replace the third sector, it's just going to give it a hand.

As for the National Citizen's Service, you'll have to give me time to digest the proposal. Remember, I'm up in Edinburgh, reading tonnes of stuff about what the Scottish Parliament is up to so forgive me if I can't chew over the English stuff as fast as you'd like!

One last thing... I'd love to know that 'you' exists, which blogger wouldn't? So if 'you' are really out there why not post a comment? Disagree with me, call me a closet Tory, an idiot, a numbskull or tell me my analysis is spot on and I write prose that Dickens would envy but, either way, send something! After all, in the words of The Feeling, "I love it when you call but you never call at all!"

Tea with the Queen

My last post was certainly over-optimistic about how likely it was the Queen would be able to give me a wave at the Royal Garden Party, which I've just attended (13 July). I'm not very good at estimating numbers in crowds but there must have been a couple of thousand people there. The Royal Archers acted as human cordon but spaced far enough apart so that folk could see as the Queen made her way from the back door of the Palace of Holyroodhouse, through the lavish gardens and to the Royal Tea Tent, which has a replica crown on top of it, seriously! (It's rather kitsch actually). On the way various people were presented to her and, for obvious reasons, that included quite a few soldiers as the rest of us looked on. What would normally be a short walk thereby took an hour. It was a beautiful sunny afternoon, the sandwiches, cakes, lemonade and tea were great and the surroundings were, naturally, impressive. I never, in a month of Sundays, imagined I'd attend such an event but life's full of surprises. Anyway, these last two posts have been made in the spirit of a summer interlude. Now I have a submission to the Scottish Labour party's policy consultation to write. Perhaps that'll be the subject of next time's blog. Or maybe the UK Government will have released further details about 'Ageing Well' by then. Ah, policy detail, doncha just love it?

Meeting Her Majesty

In a wee departure from the usual policy-heavy stuff, this week I thought I'd let you know that I'm going to meet the Queen on Tuesday 13 July. She's WRVS's patron in case you didn't know or hadn't guessed Well, I say 'meet', I've been invited to the Royal Garden Party at the Queen's Edinburgh residence Holyrood Palace, along with hundreds of others. I'd like to think she'll say hello but who knows? I'll blog about it but in the meantime here's my other Queen story:

My car once broke down near Holyrood Palace. The gearbox seized and it was completely undrivable. Luckily for me, the Queen was about to arrive so the area was crawling with police officers, who, when they discovered my car was 'kaput', physcially pushed it up a side street for me! Security risk you see but it got me out of a jam. And as I was walking home who should pass by in her Rolls Royce but Her Majesty! I wonder whether I'll get as close this time. Maybe I could tell her that story. What do you think?

Death by a thousand cuts!

WHOOAAA! Danny Alexander, Chief Secretary to the Tresury, has told Cabinet colleagues to get ready to find 40% budget savings from their departments. This is in order that the Government can spread the overall 25% cuts unevenly across the whole portfolio of its activities and protect some departments like health.

There's a big picture question about what this means for Britain but sticking to my "wee windae" remit and with no disrespect to public sector colleagues (I was one once): for organisations in the third sector, like WRVS, we will have to wait and see what this means for third sector services and practices. Simply put there's a fork in the road here and its a choice of either a) embrace the third sector way of doing things (and I include the full range of community groups, social enterprises etc in that) and turn the crisis into a massive opportunity for an expansion of the third sector justified by its demonstrable people-centred ethos, added value and efficiency b) retrench, retrench, retrench: take public services back in-house, preserve state provision as the core preferred method and show external providers the door. There are pros and cons to either approach, of course, but with some arguing that we're now looking at a paradigm shift in the way we support vulnerable people (older and otherwise) in the UK, I suggest this is going to push us further towards a sea change rather than simply meaning an extended period of tinkering with the mixed model of 'a bit of this and a bit of that' which characterises the current landscape.

Want a bell weather? Watch what local government is saying: LGA, COSLA, WLGA

Talkin' Healthy Volunteering in NHS Scotland with WRVS

In Scotland volunteering in health is a hot topic, built explicitly into the Scottish Government’s strategy for the NHS and, naturally, WRVS is involved. Andrew Jackson, who sits on the National Action Group responsible for implementing the NHS volunteering strategy, recently gave an interview to primo political magazine Holyrood, talking about just how volunteers can improve the health of others and of themselves.

Who cares about social care? Volunteers, that's who!

Taking off my Scots bunnet just for now and putting on my English... er... Bowler hat? Top hat? What do folk wear on their heads down south these days? Well, anyway, whatever you wear to declare your Englishness imagine that I’m wearing that because I’m blogging today to talk about social care in England and what the UK’s coalition government are going to do about it, once they have got over the trauma of David Laws departure. If ever there was a story that could use the word ‘rocked’ without sounding wildly inappropriate, this was it. But I don’t have time to go there today. If his replacement, Danny Alexander, MP for Inverness, Nairn, Badenoch & Strathspey (that’s basically the Highlands for you guys) the here-today-gone-today ex- Scottish Secretary, now Chief Secretary to the Treasury, does anything exciting maybe I’ll use his Scottishness as an excuse to blog about him. But moving swiftly on...

OK: there’s a quartet of big headlines under the social care policy heading. There’ll be a Commission on long term care to report within a year, barriers between health and social care will be broken down, theree'll be more use of personal budgets and more use of direct payments. This is set in the context of the rest of the coalition agreement which includes a bigger role for the third sector in public service delivery, help for older people to live at home longer through adaptations and community support programmes (though it doesn’t specify what this will look like in practice), more spending on the NHS, more opportunities for public sector staff (presumably including NHS staff?) to run services themselves using the cooperative model, pensions re-linked to earnings, retirement age up to 66 by 2016 for men and 2020 for women and so on.

So what? Well, anyone with an interest in social care should, while keeping an eye out for the development of all these policies, get off the blocks as soon as there’s an announcement of the Commission chair and get on the blower to him/her to have their say (and if they’re really influential they should be calling the Health Secretary, Andrew Lansley and Paul Burstow MP, Minister of State for Care Services and making some suggestions about who the chair should be). It seems that, while, according to the coalition agreement, the Commission will have to consider both a voluntary insurance scheme and the Wanless recommendations, all other bets are off. The Commission was a Lib Dem policy, the Tories already had theirs worked up, so I guess we can take it that they couldn’t jointly agree on a social care policy or on any of the numerous proposals that have come out in recent years. We know this because if they had, well, they would have said so wouldn’t they?

Commissions are traditionally a way of ‘kicking something into the long grass’, as they say in political circles (i.e. if we talk about it for long enough everyone will forget about it and we won’t have to do anything) but this time the issue is too immediate and important for that, as well as there being a huge question mark over how its paid for. With an ageing population there has to be some sort of change to the English system to make it work for people, which may or may not contribute to solving the country’s economic woes, meaning it will cost the state less, although it really will have to will have to be economically viable if it stands any chance of going ahead. It seems certain that, whatever proposals emerge or are accepted, it will involve greater cost to individuals who need care. Why? Well, Liam Byrne’s (Labour ex-Chief Secretary to the Treasury) note to David Laws (you know who he is) saying "Dear chief secretary, I'm afraid there is no money. Kind regards – and good luck!" might have been flippant but it was basically true. Just how this ends up being squared with the social care budget remains to be seen but squared it will have to be.

But here’s a thought for you: WRVS runs on volunteers and the impact they can have in the social care arena has been made clear in a recent report. We may not run what you’d think of as ‘social care services’ but our services occupy a space very close to them and it’s obvious that if people can stay independent, healthy and happy in their own homes for longer and therefore don’t require NHS or social care services as soon as they otherwise would, pressure on health and social care budgets is eased.

WRVS – and thousands of other voluntary organisations – arose from an initial spark, an upsurge of energy and effort, a passion and a readiness in people to tackle social problems for themselves, to look after each other as opposed to waiting for the government to do it. And in many, if not all cases, such organisations started out without a brass bean in the bank. But they still got on and did things, thanks to voluntary effort.

Now, neither I nor WRVS are suggesting that the state should be let off the hook, to be allowed to do less and less while making us do everything for nothing yet still ratcheting our taxes up (Prime Minister Dave will tell you that’s a fundamental misunderstanding of his ‘Big Society’). No. What I’m suggesting is that if we can recognise that there is a tremendous energy out there for mutual support it needs to be developed in tandem with good state services – whoever delivers those, either the state directly or someone on behalf of the state – to make sure people get what they need and so we can make the best use of our money. If we face massive service cuts because the state hasn’t got the money - and, regardless of the rights and wrongs of how we ended up in this mess and who is really to blame and who will suffer as a result, let’s be clear: the state hasn’t got the money - shouldn’t we be thinking creatively about how the shoulder of voluntary action can best be turned to the wheel rather than ending up being exploited or mistaken for a substitute for paid jobs or, possibly even worse, just being discounted because of a lack of understanding about the potential role volunteers and the voluntary (third, charitable, social enterprise, whatever) sector could, can (must?) play.

I’m not suggesting we can run things like specialist cancer care on wide eyed enthusiasm and people who can manage to be around on alternate Tuesdays and Fridays and, God knows, sometimes even the most straightforward tasks involve hacking through reels of red tape and someone might have to be paid to do that, but there are many services and activities, social care being a good example, which could benefit from much more extensive volunteer involvement. And that energy and willingness is out there.

Look at it this way; if the alternative is saying goodbye to these activities forever or ending up with second rate services, hobbling along with only pennies in their pockets, what have we got to lose?

Putting People at the Heart of Care

Frantic. That's what it's been like. Frantic. In a job like the one I do for WRVS (Media and Public Affairs) the General Election is somewhat akin to the football World Cup in terms of all-bets-are-off madness, tension, excitement, TV gawked at, radio earwigged too, newspapers poured over,websites scanned, tweets and blogs and every-online-thing else sucked up, junk food guzzled and tea made (I'm not a coffee drinker, that really would send me over the edge). There are those that would find this level of interest in politics rather sad. In fact, I'm one of them but I have learnt to live with myself. And, for the avoidance of doubt, I am just as excited about the real World Cup 2010 that will take place in South Africa in June.

And its far from over. The now traditional 'congratulating of the new Ministers' which charities tend to do these days (i.e. a bunch of letters, usually suggesting a meeting that vaguely resembles some sort of date, to talk about how they can work with Government for the benefit of the people the charity supports) takes up some time. Then there's the policy detail itself. Ordinarily, the analysis of party manifestos that people like me and my colleagues do pre-election would serve as the basis for understanding what the new Government will get up too but in the uncharted choppy waters in which we are now swimming, that analysis only blows up the life raft so much. The tiny little eight pager that Dave and Nick put out last week was but a sliver of the forthcoming doorstopper that will arrive next week. The official coalition document will get down to much more detail about the full range of policies (although not to the level they will eventually need to be worked out to). Only then will the true picture of Britian's future will emerge. Although I should point out that 90% of the policies this tome will contain are essentially for England and to a lesser extent Wales. It seems to me that few people in England really understand just how much policy is devolved to the Scottish Parliament (no disrespect intended; I'm English born and bred, the son of a Scottish faither and an English mither but I now live and work in Edinburgh). From a WRVS point of view the two biggies are care and volunteering. Both devolved. And in the case of care, the Scottish Government is tanking ahead with proposals for a Self-Directed Support (SDS) Strategy and a Bill, in response to which WRVS has offered some comment, which you can read here. SDS is similar to Individual Budgeting and Direct Payments are a part of it. It advances the 'personalisation' agenda in Scotland, which is a big feature of the English care landscape and looks as if it will only grow in importance across the UK. That's certainly what the manifestos were suggesting in all their various UK, Scottish and Welsh editions - that was an innovation that quadrupled my bedtime reading for a week or so!

Basically SDS means handing control of care to the person who gets that care to a greater or lesser degree, depending on how that person wants to play it. It means really putting them at the heart of it. If they want to, they can decide what they need and who provides it and they control the budget, which gets given to them, usually by the local authority. It's the Scottish Government's hope that SDS will be the main way care is delivered in future and that almost certainly means a pretty radical shift away from monolithic care services provided by the state or by large private or third sector providers, to a greater variety of smaller more tailored services. It's more or less a market model and WRVS's interest lies in providing the kind of great, volunteer delivered services that, while not exactly 'care' services in the formal sense, can complement such a system and make sure older and disabled people can continue to live independently in their own communities, fully plugged into the life of those communities, rather than being isolated, lonely and stuck for a friendly ear or someone to help them get out and about. So, if you're interested have a read. And hang on for some more General Election related blogging coming here soon! Promise!

Too busy to blog: or why meeting the First Minister of Scotland meant I was offline

I have no idea what the form is for bloggers in general but I am aware that some of the most successful (ie widely read and influential) political bloggers are successful because their blogs are constantly current. These folk appear to have either hours of spare time every day or are so mentally – and possibly physically - hyperactive that they can toss off the daily blog as quick as a wink and get on with doing whatever else it is that they do.

The reason I haven’t blogged for so long - fun as it is, and it really is - is because I’ve been struggling to come up for air from under the current stormy sea of work in the actual world. Up in Scotland WRVS is experiencing a mini-flood of visits by Scottish politicians to WRVS services or by WRVS to various public events and it all takes organisation, preparation and of course, some performance on the day/night.

In this last fortnight (that is the last half of March) alone, we have seen:

• The First Minister of Scotland, Alex Salmond MSP, MP, welcome WRVS Chief Executive Lynne Berry – with a supporting cast of Angela Geer, Head of Older People’s Services UK, Margaret Paterson, Head of Older People’s Services Scotland and... er... who else was there, oh yes, me! – to his official residence in Edinburgh, Bute House, to talk about WRVS’ work.
• A visit to visit our Auchinairn lunch club by the Labour leader in the Scottish Parliament, Iain Gray MSP, plus his Scottish Parliamentary colleague, deputy spokesperson on finance and skills David Whitton MSP (don’t let that junior shadow post fool you; Whitton’s one of Labour’s policy-brains and ex-right hand man to two previous Scottish Parliamentary leaders). Hats off to the patient older people who are members of the club and all credit to the volunteers, particularly Eleanor Swann, and to Local Service Manager Jackie Gallagher and Service Delivery Manager Alison Love (I promised I'd include a thanks on the Blog so there it is!).

• WRVS talking about the future of older people’s care on BBC Reporting Scotland TV news and BBC Radio Good Morning Scotland, which for those unfamiliar with the UK’s northern nation is much more like being on the 6 o’clock news and Radio 4’s Today than it is being on ‘North West Tonight’. (Scotland isn’t a region after all, he said, waving his Saltire!).
• WRVS at the British Irish Council Ministerial dinner in Edinburgh (that’s representatives of every administration in the British Isles) delivering a speech about volunteering, voluntarism and handing back power to people and communities to better support older people.
• Our tireless Scottish staff continue to help plan what is now approaching a dozen visits by MSPs to our Scottish services to make sure MSPs understand what WRVS is all about in their constituencies and how much our volunteers matter to the places they live.

And since I last blogged we had a phenomenally successful reception in the Scottish Parliament on 10 February that saw around 50 WRVS volunteers, various WRVS staff, including Lynne Berry, Angela Geer, Margaret Paterson and the Scottish Service Delivery Managers, meet and talk to 45 MSPs (making it one of the most highly attended Parliamentary events I have experienced in my eight years working in this field) and a host of public and third sector luminaries about what WRVS does. I measure success here by the number of people who turned up and the fact that they were buzzing about what they’d learned about WRVS.

=whew!=

So while I love blogging, I am not enough of a desk jockey to be able to do it as much as I’d like. After all, if anyone inside or outside WRVS is going to be interested in what we’re up to, we have to be up to something! But blogs are about opinion as well as fact, so next time I'll try to get worked up about something and let rip, right here, with some entertaining invective!

Working for ‘The Man’ Every Night and Day?

Recently the National Pensioner’s Convention (NPC) slammed a recommendation by the Equality and Human Rights Commissions (ECHR) to raise the default retirement age (the age at which you can be legally required to retire whether you want to or not) to above 65 years old. Based on a (presumably representative) survey of “1,494 men and women aged 50 to 75 across Great Britain” the ECHR said:

“The majority of workers over 50 (62 per cent of women and 59 per cent of men) want to continue working beyond state pension age” and “Working longer is not a burden borne purely out of necessity: those who have elected to work longer are happy and enjoying what they do.”

Not so, say the NPC, “Britain's biggest pensioner organization; representing over 1000 local, regional and national pensioner groups with a total of 1.5m members” (NPC website). They say the “proposals have failed to properly quantify issues such as the rate of unemployment and availability of work, the rights of younger people to find a job, the quality of the jobs older people will be offered (and will be prepared to accept) and the loss to wider society if pensioner volunteers (currently undertaking unpaid caring and charitable work) were otherwise in paid employment.” The NPC raises the issues of those people who want to retire; the need for an “improved state pension system” and says “removing the default retirement age would condemn the very poorest in our society to carry on working until they die”.

A clear division of opinion then, which appears to boil down to whether you consider being able to work longer to be a form of freedom or a form of oppression; whether you have a vision of yourself still bestriding the narrow earth like a Colossus or whether you’re going to end up walking under the huge legs of others, peeping about (if you’re curious, it’s Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar I’m mangling here).

I must say that I was surprised by the vehemence of the NPC’s position. I don’t read the ECHR proposal as saying: “you must work past 65” and they don’t explicitly refer to the UK Government’s planned rise in the age at which you will be allowed to draw a state pension (67 by 2034, 68 by 2044). Nor do they say employers would have to keep you on no matter how bad at your job you were. In other words, the immediate consequence of their proposal would be merely to give to those for whom 65 appears (as it always has, in fact, been) an arbitrary age at which society deems some people “too old to work” the right not to be retired at the behest of another for no other reason than that they have had one birthday too many. In other words, the right currently enjoyed by the likes of judges, politicians and, indeed, the self-employed. It wouldn’t take away an individual’s right to choose to retire nor would it get rid of the situation that I would have thought might bother younger people looking for work a bit more, namely the fact that currently you can claim a state pension at 65 and keep on working if you can find suitable work. Personally; I have no problem with that ‘anomaly’ but I can see how a young person might see it as like being allowed to claim unemployment benefit at the same time as having a job i.e. “make up your mind, auld yin, are you retired or not?”

Whether someone is “too old to work” because society thinks they’re a clapped out old donkey or because it thinks it’s time they should be rewarded with a life of leisure; it doesn’t change the fact that currently people can “be retired” at 65 with no comeback; a little bit like in the movie Logan’s Run where folk were exploded when they hit 30 to keep the population down inside the post-apocalyptic bio-dome. If I were an employer I’d hope to have better performance measurement criteria in place than age alone. If someone’s crap at their job it doesn’t matter of they’re 26, 36 or 66 does it? Get shot of them! And if someone is brilliant, wouldn’t you want to keep him or her on, yea, even unto the nonagenarians?

Look at this way; I’m 39 and relatively fit. Arnold Schwarzenegger is 63. You’re about to be mugged. Who would you rather see coming up the street to help you? “Aha”, you say, “Arnie’s an exception”. But that’s exactly the point. And that’s why we need to account for individual choice: whether it’s to work or retire. After all, eventually, we’ll be gone for good and none of us will be back. No hasta la vista baby!

Interested in an exciting new role at WRVS?

We're incredibly excited by a new research project that's really going to change the way WRVS, and all its partners, approach living well in old age. WRVS have been awarded nearly half a million pounds from the BIG Lottery to carry out this research, which is the first of its kind to focus on how people themselves can help each other to improve their health and live well for longer. We will be challenging national and local government, health authorities and other partners to use the tools and campaigning materials we develop to better enable people to help each other and themselves, and on their own terms.
We're currently recruiting a project worker to run this project - if you are interested see www.wrvs.org.uk/jobs by the closing date of Monday 1st February.

The project starts up in April 2010 and will run for three years. In the first year there will be a national consultation with older people on what they want in place to live well in old age. Followed by two years of work in five areas of the UK where project workers will develop new ways of engaging older people to help each other to improve their quality of life.

WRVS has joined forces with two partners with a reputation for involving people in developing and improving the services they need: Professor Peter Beresford of the Centre for Citizen Participation, Brunel University and Jennie Fleming, Centre for Social Action, De Montfort University.

This is great news for WRVS - and for everyone with a stake in older people's health and well-being.

Can't afford to volunteer?

Have you ever wanted to volunteer but couldn't afford to?  Take a look at the Vodafone World of Difference programme.  Every year hundred's of people are given the oppportunity to work with charities around the world and receive funding so they can still afford to eat and pay the bills!

One of our volunteers Andrew Graves has received funding from Vodafone’s World of Difference to spend two months volunteering at Thanet Good Neighbours, which provides older people with companionship and help with jobs around the house.

Andrew became a WRVS volunteer after being made redundant last year. He was able to offer a few hours a week, which gave him enough time to change a light bulb, hang a picture or put up curtains. Thanks to the Vodafone funding he is able to volunteer full time for 2 months. The extra time means Andrew is able to do more and build trust with the people he’s working with.

Andrew has been helping Alan, who was made homeless last year after a fire made his home inhabitable. He has spent the last 10 months sleeping on a friend’s sofa. Andrew has been helping Alan move back home, taking him to buy new white goods and supporting him through the process.

Through World of Difference people can get paid experience - for two months or a year - at a charity of their choice in the UK or overseas. To date it has allowed over 700 individuals, around the world, to work for their dream charity - and be paid. For more information visit http://www.vodafone.com/world_of_difference.html

Visit Andrew's blog too!  http://worldofdifference.vodafone.co.uk/uk/andrew-graves/

Scotland the Brave and a Sign of the Times

When you’re neck deep in politics, having a Government Minister visit one of your projects because he thinks it’s an exemplar of what things are all about is as exciting as the sight of a great big pot of honey is to Winnie the Pooh.

This week then, I was cock-a-hoop that Jim Mather, Scottish Government Minister for Enterprise, Energy and Tourism came to see the WRVS Good Neighbours project in Cockenzie, East Lothian and met volunteers Alan MacKay, Graham Schofield, Isobel Murray and Margaret Dickson along with project Manager Tracey Walkingshaw and Service Delivery Manager Stephen McIlroy.

Her stayed for an hour and had a really good chat with them all about the fantastic work they’ve been doing battling treacherous conditions to help older people stay safe and well during the recent whiteout. He also talked about how he saw volunteer effort marrying with business and wider interests to create strong, resourceful communities. Whatever your politics, you can’t fault Mr Mather’s intelligence, energy and commitment.

Mr Mather said, “The Scottish Government very much recognises the important contribution that voluntary action makes at times like these and I’ve been particularly struck by how these volunteers don’t see themselves or their work as something special. They just get on with it. That spirit is admirable and we commend their efforts.”

WRVS is particularly glad we were able to celebrate our volunteers’ achievements for older people without having to lament any tragedies. While the mainstream media seems ghoulishly keen on death and disaster at least on our own Blog we can feature some good news stories! And we’re on YouTube! Hey, how twenty first century are we! Check it out! www.youtube.com/watch?v=8tPFibOquGc

Just so you know, in 2009 WRVS East Lothian Good Neighbours saw 71 volunteers spend 4000 hours intensively assisting 45 older people with almost 1200 different 'tasks' (e.g. shopping, hospital, GPs, social activities) on over 500 separate occasions, involving 1000 individual journeys. That’s some level of intensive support: good on ‘em.

Volunteer Amanda Hall from Kirklees Good Neighbours and the lady she helps in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, Joyce Heaton also meant WRVS shone in the Times in England over Christmas, where we were touted as a great solution to older people’s isolation in a piece that covered some very much less upbeat situations. www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/life_and_style/health/mental_health/article6972032.ece