Margaret Prosser’s speech to AGE UK Age Discrimination/European Year conference “Rights, Representation, Recognition, Respect: Making it Reality” 

 

Thank you for giving me the opportunity to address this important conference today, and to say a few words about the role of the new Commission for Equality and Human Rights in helping to secure equality and human rights for older people. We haven’t quite come into existence yet – we start on October 1st, which means that right now we can lay claim to be the very youngest institution in the country. But our extreme youth doesn’t mean we’re not concerned about older people – in fact, they are a central part of our remit and focus.

As you all know, an awareness of the importance of age equality, and of the need to tackle discrimination on grounds of age, was one of the reasons for setting up the Commission for Equality and Human Rights in the first place. One of the many “firsts” to which the CEHR will be able to lay claim is that it will be the first statutory body in the UK with a specific mandate to enforce age equality legislation.

Another reason for setting up the CEHR was a perception that while the existing equality commissions – the Commission for Racial Equality, the Equal Opportunities Commission and the Disability Rights Commission – were doing a good job in relation to the specific areas of race, sex and disability discrimination which fell within their remit, they were less well equipped to deal with what we might call “compound discrimination”: cases in which people are discriminated against or experience inequality because they are both Asian and female, for example. And, of course, there were key areas of discrimination – religion and belief, sexual orientation and, crucially for this gathering, age – which they didn’t cover at all. Those areas are important in their own right, and also important because they interact with other grounds on which people experience discrimination and inequality. So the CEHR will bring those strands together.

You will already be familiar with the equality challenges which face older people as a group. And you’ll be particularly aware of the fact that those challenges are only going to grow as our population ages. By the middle of this century, the number of people in the UK aged 80 or over will be double what it is today. That’s something to celebrate – people are living longer, and people are staying healthy and active longer. But at the same time, it will put unprecedented pressure on health and social care services, as well as on family members who will provide unpaid care.

The key insight which the CEHR is qualified to make about all this is that none of it exists in isolation, and none of it can be put in a box marked “older people’s issues” and ignored by people who think they are interested in other things. That’s partly because seeing “older people’s issues” as a matter just for older people is short-sighted. We are not all old - but most people who are not old now hope that they will be old one day: it's better than the alternative. Many of the people who will be contributing to an expected 45% rise in demand for informal care by 2026 do not think of themselves as old quite yet, even if they will do by then. Many of the people who will be providing that care to their older parents in 2026 are now young adults just beginning to think about entering the workplace, starting a family, living independently.

And our thinking about older people needs to be informed by other social trends which, on the face of it, might look unconnected. Young people reaching adulthood are more likely to move away from their parents’ home, and even their parents’ part of the country, than ever before. Women are more likely to aspire to a career, and more likely to have a job, than ever before. Families are more likely to rely on both men’s and women’s salaries to pay the mortgage than ever before. That all means that we can’t just make the assumptions we used to make about who will house and provide informal care for older people.

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The inequality experienced by older people is closely connected with other inequality strands, too. We know that older people’s poverty is a crucial issue – but we also know that older women are considerably poorer than older men. Income in retirement is strongly linked to a person’s participation in employment during working age – so employment disadvantage is carried through into disadvantage after working age. Sex inequality and age inequality can’t be seen in isolation from each other, and the CEHR will be able to look at them together.

The same goes for other equality strands. The disability benefit system is discriminatory on age grounds, and social care services for older disabled people are much more restricted than those for younger disabled adults. Older people from ethnic minority groups are more likely to live in poverty than older people in general, and more likely to have housing problems – partly because people from ethnic minority groups are more likely overall to live in deprived areas. Older people from these groups often have difficulty accessing key services because their religious, dietary and language needs are not met. And there is still relatively little understanding of the particular issues facing older gay, lesbian, bisexual and transsexual people – but we do know that housing and social services often display a lack of awareness of their needs, or even outright prejudice, and that even though they have increased health and wellbeing risks there are few services geared towards them.

There are some who think that putting responsibility for all of these inequality strands into one Commission risks diluting the importance of all of them, or creates a recipe for confusion. I disagree. It is by recognising that the strands are inter-connected and often inseparable, that we can make the most powerful case for change. I mentioned earlier the demographic shifts which are putting massive pressure on health and social care services, leading 80% of local authorities to ration care by tightening eligibility criteria, and 70% to provide support only to those with the greatest level of need. The cuts which threaten older people threaten disabled people too. And they threaten carers of disabled people, and carers of older people – carers who are, incidentally, disproportionately female, and a quarter of whom are themselves over 65. Seeing this through the prism of just one equality strand – as just an older people’s issue, or just a disabled people’s issue, or just a carers’ issue, or just a women’s issue – isn’t just misleading. It makes efforts to change things less effective, by making the problem look less serious than it really is – or, at worst, by appearing to set one cause against another. Campaigners for the rights of older people need to make common cause with campaigners who may focus on different groups, but who share their desire for justice.

I hope that one of the benefits of the CEHR will be to help people who are fighting against injustice, inequality and discrimination to make common cause with each other – we want to intervene in debates about equality, and to work to build a positive culture of human rights, and I hope that the fact that we will do so on a wide range of issues will help people – decision-makers, stakeholders and the general public – to make connections between those issues.

In order to do that effectively, we need to work in partnership with organisations and individuals who have expertise in the areas we will cover. We need our policy interventions to be based on robust evidence, and we’ll be keen to hear evidence from you about where we need to intervene. Our job is to keep your issues on the political agenda. We want to be a resource for you, and we need you to be a resource for us as we work to challenge inequality and discrimination, and to promote human rights, for older people and for all people. I’m looking forward to working with you.

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