19 per cent to Housing Benefit.
Older people’s charities, such as Age Concern and Help the Aged, already do a fair bit to alert older people and their families and friends to claim the benefits they are entitled to. But they could do much more, and this is where their polite approach to campaigning and providing help is less than useful. Many older people watch TV a great deal in the daytime, and a really angry television campaign might alert people to what they are entitled to. Giving them numbers to call and encouraging them to go to the Citizen’s Advice Bureau – even taking part in the campaign – might also help. There was a high-profile launch of Age Concern’s ‘Your Rights’ campaign, but we need to shame benefits officers into going out and finding older people who are not claiming. They are doing just this in some parts of the country; why can’t they do it everywhere?
Fuel poverty
The poverty that older people are often particularly prone to is ‘fuel poverty’, not being able to afford proper heating. This is defined by the Faculty of Public Health as the situation where any household has to spend more than 10 per cent of its income on keeping warm. Older people need their houses to be warmer than younger people do, and often live in poorly insulated housing, or in their former family home, not having wished to move house, which is expensive to heat, particularly if they are living on their own. A total of 1.25 million pensioner households spend more than 10 per cent of their income on fuel.
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