Select Committee on Office of the Deputy Prime Minister: Housing, Planning, Local Government and the Regions Minutes of Evidence


Examination of Witnesses (Questions 617-619)

3 FEBRUARY 2004

MR CHRIS BAIN AND MS HELENA HERKLOTS

  Q617 Chairman: May I welcome you to the final session of the Committee this afternoon on social cohesion and ask you to identify yourselves for the record, please?

  Ms Herklots: I am Helena Herklots, Head of Policy at Age Concern England.

  Mr Bain: I am Chris Bain, National Development Manager at Age Concern England.

  Chairman: We give people a chance to make a statement at the beginning, if they want or are you happy for us to go straight to questions? Straight to questions.

  Q618 Chris Mole: Your paper set out the many barriers to older people playing their full part in creating cohesive communities. What single change would make a real difference in breaking down those barriers?

  Mr Bain: I should think a much more localised approach, a community development based approach to working with communities and with older people, would actually enable those barriers to be more clearly identified. As for solutions to them: solutions have to be developed in consultation with people else they will not be sustainable solutions. Those can be developed on a very localised basis and then the learning from that can then be spread more widely through communities and across cities.

  Q619 Chris Mole: Ted Cantle's report after the disturbances in Oldham, Bradford and Burnley does not really address the question of elderly people. Why is the role of older people in creating cohesive communities being overlooked?

  Mr Bain: It is a difficult one to answer. It should really be the policy makers who answer. My view is that it has not been sufficiently high up the political agenda, because older people are not a corporate group who make their views known. They are a very disparate group, as any group in society is and they have not made use of their political power. They have the opportunity to do so now because they are not voting in the tribal ways that older people in previous generations used to vote. They are thinking independently and making pragmatic choices. With that, the political profile of people will rise and my experience is that as the political profile rises, so politicians take people more seriously.


 
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