Age UK London recently hosted its Older Londoners’ Election Hustings 2021 and have also released its Manifesto.
We asked the top London Mayoral Candidates if they would write a blog post for older Londoners. Here we have the first piece, from Mandu Reid, Leader of the Women’s Equality Party.
Age UK London have been campaigning to protect older Londoners’ travel concessions, which include the Freedom Pass and 60+ Oyster card. New limits on when these concessions could be used and the threat of cuts meant there was a very real danger that these lifelines for so many people might disappear en
We will all have our own memories of the start of this crisis. For me the most vivid was actually not one of the more negative ones. It wasn’t the anxiety I felt, like everyone else, as I grabbed as much office equipment as I could and headed home on the train fearing the worst.
Shortly after COVID arrived, demands were made to use it as the opportunity to do things differently, just as cholera epidemics of the nineteenth century led to clean water supplies and sewage systems. This is summarised as ‘Build Back Better’ — the wake-up call that COVID exacerbated problems, requiring us to come together and plan to improves people’s lives and prosperity.
Before breakfast on Sunday 1st November we learnt that the new funding deal for Transport for London (TfL) did not include cuts or additional restrictions on older Londoners’ travel concessions (primarily the Older Persons’ Freedom Pass and the 60+ Oyster card). The previous 48-hours had been a time of anxious waiting.
The fall in the proportion of older people living in poverty has been one of the great public policy success stories of recent decades. In the mid 90s, it was fairly common to see press stories of older people eking out pensions, huddled under blankets unable to afford fuel, or living on cheap, poorly
Did you know that London has the worst ‘pensioner poverty’ rate in the country and that poverty among older Londoners is rising?
With Winter approaching, and sadly the coronavirus still with us, we are again raising our concerns about the health risks of living in a cold home, particularly for older people who are likely to be spending most of their time at home.
I suspect that, like many others aged over 50, COVID-19 has created its own unique challenges, especially around work. The latest statistics regarding unemployment and the over 50s are shocking with the Centre for Ageing Better and the Learning and Work Institute speculating “that one in 10 male, and eight in 10 female workers in their 50s and 60s face a significant risk of losing their jobs as the furlough scheme is wound down, as they are employed in “shutdown sectors” hardest hit by the lockdown.”
The current pandemic has revealed some of the deepest inequalities that have often remained hidden in our society. Ageing Better in Camden’s members have been writing a weekly newsletter for one another throughout lockdown, as a way to keep informed in these challenging times.
