Baroness Greengross: standing up for older people

By Tony Watts - Editor - 18/06/2007

I can vouch for the fact that, for years, the best place for a journalist to go for a pithy quote on older people’s issues was Sally Greengross.

As Director General of Age Concern England from 1987 until 2000, (she remains their Vice President) she was guaranteed when asked to speak her mind without fear or favour. Her efforts have won her acclaim – she was voted UK Woman of Europe in 1990 - and an impressive seven honorary doctorates. And while her roles may have changed in recent times, she remains the UK’s most authoritative – and outspoken – of journalists’ sources.

As ever, when we talk on key issues she still has firm views, views which are also tempered by her extensive involvement with older people’s health and social issues on an international platform. Amongst a long list of other major involvements she is also Chief Executive of the International Longevity Centre UK and she co-chairs the European Alliance for Health and the Future. It’s an important advantage: only by comparing and benchmarking different cultures’ treatment of older people can we really hope to make major moves forward.

Her move to the House of Lords has kept her firmly in the front line. Determinedly a crossbencher, she is also one of the busiest members – sitting on an array of committees and regularly speaking out on a huge array of key issues affecting the lives of older people: pensions, elder abuse; grandparents rights; ageism in the workplace; nutrition in hospitals; home care for the elderly; even the rights of long-term sibling cohabitees.

When I tell her that the stats say she is one of The Lords’ most vocal members she is modestly surprised; but, as she says, there is no shortage of issues which need to be raised.

Having passed the “national default retirement age” some time ago, a point when some people might consider easing back, her workload seems to have increased in recent years. And, as from last year, she is now one of the Commissioners for Equality and Human Rights. Each commissioner, on paper at least, has a brief to consider all “minority” interests; but there’s little question that she is the representative with the most experience in older people’s issues.

So is the CHRE the right vehicle to deal with discrimination against older people? “I think so,” she says. “For start it’s important for it to be integrated with other strands. Age is as unreliable an indictator of people’s capability as their race, sex and so on.

“But it will take time for ageism to be recognised in the same way and it will need test cases to go forward and it will need a lot of enforcement. The new age legislation was a cave in, especially on the default age of 65. As it stands, age discrimination is still not as comprehensively covered as other ‘strands’. It might cover employment, but not goods and services. That said, the law stops behaviour, but it doesn’t change attitudes.”

So faint praise there for the Government but – with Tony Blair about to hand over the reins of power – how would she sum up Labour’s performance in relation to older people’s issues?

“Well they have done quite a bit. Pension Credit was a good initiative. So was Sure Start. There’s more freedom of choice in services. So their policies have largely been in the right direction. But they could have been so much bolder.

“And some major issues really aren’t being addressed. Alzheimer’s, for instance, is increasing all the time, but there’s no strategy to deal with that. And withholding drugs which cost £2.50 a day is just silly.

“The real cost to the nation is what it takes in carers’ time.”
So does our model of providing care for the elderly and frail actually work? In her opinion we’re effectively caught between two opposing cultures. In Southern Europe, the extended family is still there as the bedrock support. In Scandinavia there is a highly sophisticated welfare system. The UK has neither one nor the other.
“But,” she says, “support the carers and the burden on the rest of the system will be reduced.”

There is, Baroness Greengross concedes, a long way to go in changing attitudes and putting clear long term policies in place which all political parties can sign up to. But on one issue she is adamant: that the widely held belief that older people are a burden on society is wrong. “If you listen to some people the nation is going to be overrun by oldies. Nonsense. If you handle it properly, these people can contribute to the GDP. Key to that is ‘compressing morbidity’ – reducing the number of years towards the end of a person’s life that are spent in ill health.

“Those last seven or eight years should be lived with a greater degree of autonomy,” she says, “but only if we can improve people’s health and lifestyle.” She quotes Michael Marmot’s groundbreaking work with the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing which showed that individuals who are 50–59 years-old and from the poorest fifth of the population are over 10 times more likely to die than their peers from the richest fifth.

“It’s the inequalities in society,” she maintains, “that are critical in producing figures like that. And only by eliminating the inequalities can we all have a fair chance of successful ageing successfully and enjoying a healthy retirement.”

There’s a long way to go before that vision is achieved; but it won’t be for lack of trying by Baroness Greengross.