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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