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Age Concern and Help the Aged

Age Concern and Help the Aged A merger whose time has come Michelle Mitchell Charity Director, Age Concern and Help the Aged For the first time ever, there are now more people in the UK who are aged over 65 than under 16. The demographic landscape has changed forever and this presents new challenges and opportunities, both for society and for older people themselves. Yet public attitudes remain stuck in a bygone era and there is little sign that either businesses or government are adapting the way they work to this changing reality. Faced with this situation, Age Concern and Help the Aged felt that it was time for a step change in their own approach. Their activities were increasingly overlapping and they wanted to reduce duplication so that together they could do more to ensure a better quality of life for older people. The new merged charity was launched in April and immediately set out its analysis of age in the UK and its agenda for action in the report One Voice: Shaping our Ageing Society. Age Concern and Help the Aged has a clear vision of a world in which older people will flourish and it is our mission to improve the lives of older people – not incrementally but by delivering radical and transformational change. We are setting out to deliver this vision in three main ways. Firstly, we will influence the attitudes and decisions of members of the public, professionals, businesses and government. Secondly, we will both deliver flagship national services, such as information and advice, and work for the Age Concern federation to deliver locally tailored services for older people. Finally, we will trade commercially both to generate revenue but also to move markets in a way that benefits older people. One Voice showed that many of the key indicators of older people’s well-being were either stagnant or deteriorating, even as our population ages. We are setting out to address this at a time of great change, not only in demography but also in the economic and political worlds. Global and domestic recession has had an immediate impact. For example, workers over 50 are at risk of becoming a lost generation and spending their retirements in poverty. They face the fastest proportional rise in unemployment of any age group and more than half have no private pension provision. As we seek to address these new issues we are faced with projections of what could be a decade of real-terms public spending cuts. And it is also a time of great political uncertainty, which means it is not clear in which direction public policy agenda will turn in the remainder of the year and from 2010. Yet we view the future with optimism and, as one of the largest charities in the UK, we will use our position to bring real and beneficial change to older people. Our activities will be evidence-based from our research activities, where we will seek to establish the charity as an authority on ageing. As the population ages into a new century, we will hope to make real progress on the many issues that have been addressed so effectively by the authors contributing to this special edition of Quality in Ageing. Quality in Ageing Volume 10 Issue 2 June 2009 © Pavilion Journals (Brighton) Ltd 2009 http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Quality in Ageing and Older Adults Pier Professional

Age Concern and Help the Aged

Mitchell, Michelle
Quality in Ageing and Older Adults , Volume 10 (2) – Jun 1, 2009
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Publisher
Pier Professional
Copyright
Copyright © 2009 by Pier Professional Limited
ISSN
1471-7794
eISSN
2042-8766
Publisher site
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Abstract

A merger whose time has come Michelle Mitchell Charity Director, Age Concern and Help the Aged For the first time ever, there are now more people in the UK who are aged over 65 than under 16. The demographic landscape has changed forever and this presents new challenges and opportunities, both for society and for older people themselves. Yet public attitudes remain stuck in a bygone era and there is little sign that either businesses or government are adapting the way they work to this changing reality. Faced with this situation, Age Concern and Help the Aged felt that it was time for a step change in their own approach. Their activities were increasingly overlapping and they wanted to reduce duplication so that together they could do more to ensure a better quality of life for older people. The new merged charity was launched in April and immediately set out its analysis of age in the UK and its agenda for action in the report One Voice: Shaping our Ageing Society. Age Concern and Help the Aged has a clear vision of a world in which older people will flourish and it is our mission to improve the lives of older people – not incrementally but by delivering radical and transformational change. We are setting out to deliver this vision in three main ways. Firstly, we will influence the attitudes and decisions of members of the public, professionals, businesses and government. Secondly, we will both deliver flagship national services, such as information and advice, and work for the Age Concern federation to deliver locally tailored services for older people. Finally, we will trade commercially both to generate revenue but also to move markets in a way that benefits older people. One Voice showed that many of the key indicators of older people’s well-being were either stagnant or deteriorating, even as our population ages. We are setting out to address this at a time of great change, not only in demography but also in the economic and political worlds. Global and domestic recession has had an immediate impact. For example, workers over 50 are at risk of becoming a lost generation and spending their retirements in poverty. They face the fastest proportional rise in unemployment of any age group and more than half have no private pension provision. As we seek to address these new issues we are faced with projections of what could be a decade of real-terms public spending cuts. And it is also a time of great political uncertainty, which means it is not clear in which direction public policy agenda will turn in the remainder of the year and from 2010. Yet we view the future with optimism and, as one of the largest charities in the UK, we will use our position to bring real and beneficial change to older people. Our activities will be evidence-based from our research activities, where we will seek to establish the charity as an authority on ageing. As the population ages into a new century, we will hope to make real progress on the many issues that have been addressed so effectively by the authors contributing to this special edition of Quality in Ageing. Quality in Ageing Volume 10 Issue 2 June 2009 © Pavilion Journals (Brighton) Ltd 2009

Journal

Quality in Ageing and Older Adults – Pier Professional

Published: Jun 1, 2009

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