Older people in East Anglia are sick at the thought of their future, according to landmark report

One in four older people in East Anglia have become so worried about the future that they are making themselves ill. According to the third annual 'Spotlight' report produced by leading older people's charity Help the Aged. The number of older people concerned about their future to the extent that their physical health has been affected has risen by the equivalent of nearly a million in the last year.

'Spotlight 2008' draws attention to the issues faced by vulnerable older people living in the UK today: ageism; neglect; poverty; isolation and future deprivation. With limited progress on many of the issues in the past year, the Charity is urging the Government to remedy the long term neglect of older people. Help the Aged is challenging Gordon Brown's Government to ease their worries by ensuring they have equal rights and are free from discrimination, wherever it confronts them, from hospitals to the high street.

"This year's 'Spotlight' report shines a light on some of the worsening facts of life for today's pensioners. It's appalling that we live in a society where older people feel sick with worry about the future. The Government must ease their concerns by banning the ageism that continually sinks its poison right into the heart of our society."

Other key facts which show the reality of growing older in the UK include:-

• Grinding poverty grinds on
  In the past twelve months an estimated 200,000 extra pensioner households in the UK have been plunged into fuel poverty. The same number of older people are living in poverty in 2008 as in the previous year, with 21 per cent of pensioners surviving below the poverty line. 15 per cent of UK pensioners are living in persistent poverty.
• Ageism rife
  24 per cent of older respondents to Help the Aged research in East Anglia - equivalent to 224,880 older people - agreed that health professionals tend to treat older people as a nuisance. The Charity's 'Just Equal Treatment' campaign has highlighted the rampant age discrimination faced by older people, and called for a complete ban on age discrimination and a new duty on public bodies to promote age equality, as part of the Equality Bill announced in last week's Draft Legislative Programme.
• Dignity shock
  The proportion of older people in England who say they are not always treated with dignity in hospital has worsened from 21 per cent to 22 per cent. Provision of low level social care dropped dramatically with 11 per cent fewer households - the equivalent of well over a million people - receiving care in England than in the previous year.
• Access denied
  One in ten people in the UK aged 75 or over find it very difficult to get to their local corner shop - a jump of three percentage points in just a year. In 2008, an estimated 18,740 older people in East Anglia do not get the help they need to get out of their own home, up from 2007. According to 'Spotlight', around 121,810 older people in East Anglia are lonely - this translates nationally to a disappointingly small improvement of just three percentage points on 2007.

Paul Cann concludes:

While the report paints a rather dismal picture of growing older in the UK, there have been some steps forward. More people aged 60 and over in Great Britain are taking up their entitlement to concessionary fares and the digital divide seems to be narrowing with people aged 65 and over now more likely to have used the internet.

That said, the Government has an enormous job to do to improve the lives of older people. As society ages, the demands of older people will rightly get louder and louder. The Government must respond or run the risk of alienating millions of voters as we approach the next general election.

• Include a complete ban on age discrimination in the upcoming Equality Bill;
• Outlaw mandatory retirement ages in employment;
• The establishment of a targeted strategy to reduce pensioner poverty;
• Introduction of a system of automatic payments of benefits for older people;
• A set of clear plans for the eradication of fuel poverty in vulnerable households by 2010;
• A commitment to a new settlement for funding a transparent, universal method of delivering social care for our ageing population.