Not Dead Yet: A Manifesto for Old Age. Julia Neuberger

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       Chapter 3

       Don’t take my pride away

      End begging for entitlements

      We’ve been together now for forty years, And it don’t seem a day too much.

      Opening lines of the popular song ‘My Old Dutch’, sung at the poorhouse gates where the performer is about to be separated permanently from his wife

      While I don’t have a problem getting out of the house, it’s hard to find somewhere affordable to go. The cost determines what you can do. I’d like to go out more but I can’t afford to. If I can’t afford something, I just don’t have it. Things aren’t always easy, but you get through. I’m not defeatist – I can cope with most things … The only thing I can’t cope with is missing the wife.

       Gerald Williams, 70s, quoted in Help the Aged Spotlight report

      It is a good quarter century ago since I first got a wake-up call about some of the difficulties older people have with money, but it still feels shocking even now. I was a rabbi in Streatham at the time, and there was an older woman whom I came to know, who had been pretty confident and adept at making the benefits system work when I first knew her. Then she had a particularly nasty episode of mental illness, and when she had recovered she found enormous difficulty summoning up the gutsiness she needed to deal with the benefits office. She couldn’t bear to go there by herself, so I went with her as her rabbi. As extra comfort, she also brought along her dog.

      The dog was the first problem: the benefits staff were very difficult about her bringing it in. But there then followed the most extraordinary, frustrating and undignified interview. The benefits officer kept asking her for evidence to prove who she was. This was particularly peculiar because I was there to vouch for her, and I had brought my passport to prove who I was. But the real point was that not only was she well known to the system, but this benefits officer actually knew her.

      They could see she was vulnerable, and knew she had been mentally ill, but they still gave her a really difficult interview. It was as if the benefits officers had been trained to be obstructive, and so it proved. In fact, when I complained about her treatment, I was told that this was normal practice.

      It was also deeply unkind. It had taken a great deal of guts to go to the benefits office in the first place after what she had been through. I realized that the fact that she was old and vulnerable made it easier for them to behave like that. If that is not discrimination against the elderly, I don’t know what is.

      In the years since then, I have been struck by the huge differ ence between benefits offices. There are those that make an effort to reach out to older people and make sure they get any money they are entitled to, and there are those which – if they don’t actually bully older claimants – take advantage of their reluctance to be supplicants to a complex and aggressive bureaucracy.

      Let’s not pretend that money is a problem for all older people. Many of them are extremely wealthy. But my time as a rabbi, and more recently chairing an NHS trust, has made me realize how many older people have real difficulty claiming what they are entitled to. They don’t want to beg, so they don’t try. The result is that, for those older people who are short of money, their financial problems are seriously exacerbated. There is a similar exacerbation of other problems in old age, like poor housing, for the same reason. That is how so many older people end up much more seriously impoverished than those around them.

      Take the case of James Purvis, then 68, who featured in the series of articles written by the investigative journalist Nick Davies in the Guardian in 2005.1 Mr Purvis lived in King’s Cross, in a small, dark, damp flat – so much of the poverty of older people is related to housing problems – with a ‘thin skin of mould … on some of his furniture’. He lived alone, seeing few people, СКАЧАТЬ