A million male pensioners live alone, says Help the Aged

18/06/2008

A study by charity Help the Aged shows that more than one million male pensioners are living alone in Britain, with close to half of them saying they feel lonely and trapped in their own home. The research also found that widowhood and divorce meant older men often lost contact with relatives - who are increasingly likely to live some distance away.

 

A narrowing in the life expectancy gap between genders, combined with a rising divorce rate, means the number of older men living alone has risen by 21% in just two years - compared with a 1% increase among women of the same age. The charity’s research also found that men living on their own were far less likely than women to have regular contact with family and friends, and grandfathers were twice as likely as grandmothers to go six months without seeing their grandchildren.

 

Amy Swan, from Help the Aged, said: "Often when there is a family breakdown or a bereavement, the man finds they lose not only their wife but a lot of the other relationships that came with them. When that happens, men generally find it harder to reach out and to have the social interaction skills to build friendships.

 

"One of the things that is really sad about these findings is that when we talk to older people, they really aren’t asking for very much; for a neighbour to pop in for a cup of tea, or for their children to phone them up more often."

 

The charity runs befriending schemes across the UK so that isolated older people can receive regular phone calls from volunteers - but demand is so high that it is desperately trying to raise funds to set up more services to support people.

 

In one scheme run with Zurich Community trust, a charitable arm of the insurance firm, staff are allowed to use their work time to call an elderly person regularly. Programme manager Jane Boulton said Britain had lost its sense of "neighbourliness" while the replacement of daily meals on wheels visits with less regular calls to drop off microwave meals had denied many old people even the most basic human contact.

 

Dr George Leeson, from Oxford University’s Institute of Ageing, said men were particularly vulnerable to isolation in retirement, because so many of their social networks were based around work. "Older men often find the simultaneous loss of status, and of the social relationships that come with work, very difficult to cope with. The research that we have carried out in this field shows that they are not very good at building new networks".

 

Help the Aged runs an emergency service which pensioners can call if they feel worried or lonely. For more information visit the website below or call 020 7278 1114 (England), 0131 551 6331

(Scotland) or 02920 346 550 (Wales).