Stay warm and healthy over winter

Keep Warm Keep Well, a national government campaign targeting the reduction of cold-related illnesses and deaths during winter, offers tips and advice on keeping you warm and well this winter.

The campaign offers a variety of practical help and tips such as how to keep your house effectively insulated so as to reduce heat loss and how to stay healthy and fit during cold spells.

You can also find information on financial assistance, such as grants and benefits, that are available to you to help make your home warmer or simply to assist you in meeting the financial demands of your heating bills.

Keep Warm Keep Well produces informative leaflets that are available for those who want further information on how to stay warm and well through the cold winter months. Look out for them in your local supermarket, GP’s surgery, local pharmacy or Council offices. You can also view all the information online at http://campaigns.direct.gov.uk/keepwarmkeepwell.

For advice and information on the grants that are available call or visit:

• Warm Front Scheme on 0800 316 2805 or visit www.warmfront.co.uk
• Cold Weather Payment by visiting www.jobcentreplus.gov.uk
• Home Heat Helpline on 0800 336699 or visit www.homeheathelpline.org.uk
• Energy Saving Trust on 0800 512012 or visit www.energysavingtrust.org.uk
• National Energy Action by visiting www.nea.org.uk

It's a bird...it's a plane...it's Maggie, the 90-year-old skydiver!

by Simon Bottery, Director of Fundraising, Policy and Communications

I drove up to Northants on Sunday to witness the remarkable Maggie White leap out of a plane at 12000 feet to celebrate her 90th birthday (and raise money for Independent Age and another charity).

She was inspired to do it, said her relatives, because a friend in her 70s had done it. That's the thing about older people, easily influenced... Thank you Maggie.

You can read more about Maggie's skydive from the Hereford Times.

Perverse incentives

by Simon Bottery, Director of Fundraising, Policy and Communications for Independent Age

I have now been to three fringe meetings in two days at the Conservative party conference where speakers talked about 'perverse incentives'. This means accidentally encouraging people to do something other than what you intended and is being discussed in relation to the new Conservative proposal on social care.

Basically, this involves people paying £8000 when they are 65 and in return having the cost of any residential care covered. Since typically most people don't need to go into a care home, and only stay a couple of years on average if they do, the scheme will pay for itself, say the Conservatives. That seems fine, say the critics, but in reality people who pay the guarantee are more likely to expect to need care and will be more likely to go in earlier if they do- after all, they've already 'paid' for it. So the scheme creates a perverse incentive to use a home.

This and other issues like it are bound to be debated for some time, which is great as we do need social care to be high up on the party political agenda. But it does occur to me that currently for many people the incentive, perverse or not, is to stay at home if at all possible. An older person with care needs will not have to sell their home to pay those costs if they are living in it but may have to if they have moved out. Of course that's fine if they do want to stay at home (as most people say they do). But what about those who want to move into a home? The urge to safeguard the family home, perhaps to pass on to children, may create a determination to stay put no matter what the cost to themselves and their welfare.

Cheer on our runners in the Royal Parks Half Marathon

This Sunday, October 11, is time for the Brakes Royal Parks Half Marathon. The race starts at 9:30 am in Hyde Park and should take 2-3 hours to complete.

We have seven runners in the race this year, who are all training hard and raising money for Independent Age. Six of them have sponsorship pages on justgiving.com; to sponsor them, click on their names: Julie Alderson, Bernard Bailey, Dawn Sonnemann, Michelle Tierney, Gemma Cook and Sug Sahadevan. Email Harriet Steele if you would like to come along and cheer them on.

Let's hope the weather will be nice, and good luck to all of our runners.

How The Clash are helping are helping raise money for older people

by Simon Bottery, Director of Policy and Communications for Independent Age

Clash lead singer Joe Strummer may have died young but he is helping me complete a sponsored ‘virtual’ bike ride to Paris to raise money for Independent Age. The deal is that all five members of the management team here take turns on an exercise bike to clock up the 213 miles needed to get us to Paris. That means around 10 miles a day each. For those of us not used to cycling (that’s me) this is fairly hard work but I have discovered that the best way of putting in the miles is to listen to something stimulating on an iPod. I’ve experimented with various types of music and can exclusively reveal that loud and fast music from the late 70s and early 80s is easily the best to cycle to. I may however switch over as we get closer to our destination. Somewhere on my iPod I have a compilation of French songs from the 40s and 50s so I will give up punk for Piaf as I ‘reach’ the outskirts of Paris at the end of the week. You can support me at www.justgiving.com/simon-bottery

The potential battle over meals on wheels

by Simon Bottery, Director of Fundraising, Policy and Communications for Independent Age

By coincidence, I heard this week from the chief exec of the organisation that invented meals on wheels and, the next day, from a council that has just scrapped them. WRVS is one of those charities that emerged from government just before the second world war and is now seem as something of a national institution. Its impressive chief executive, Lynne Berry, is busily completing the transformation of the organisation from a vast conglomerate of disparate services to a more focused, directed body. But they still deliver millions of meals on wheels to elderly people each year.

Sue Warr is an (also impressive) manager in Dorset County Council, tackling social exclusion among older people. Dorset has a lot of older people: over 700,000 - well over one quarter of its population (apparently in Christchurch there is a saying that people retire to Christchurch to die and then forget what they came for). Only 189 of them use meals on wheels so the council has a new ‘access to food and nutrition’ project that aims to help more people. Those currently getting meals on wheels will get individual help to identify other ways of getting food and meals.

Dorset clearly takes older people’s issues seriously and Sue described some brilliant work to prevent and deal with social exclusion and loneliness among older people. So Dorset may well be right to think that there are better ways of providing food and nutrition to older people in the county. But I can’t help wondering whether at least some of the 189 people getting meals on wheels were actually very happy with what they were getting and wanted it to continue. It would be reassuring to know that they are happy with the new arrangements. More worryingly, will we see other councils scrapping services such as these to save money, without going to quite the lengths of Dorset to see that the existing service users get a good alternative?

Can we have personalised care in an age of spending cuts?

by Claire Nurden, Research and Policy Officer for Independent Age

I managed to grab myself a seat at one of the most popular fringes at the Liberal Democrat conference relating to older people - “Personalising care: the choices we face”. As a key concept dominating the social care agenda, the subject of personalisation proved popular, with a large number of individuals and organisations flocking in, keen to get involved in the debate.

Concerns about brokerage dominated discussions, with those involved stressing that any right to “choice” must be accompanied by a right not to choose. All agreed that those receiving social care must be given the right amount of support to make the most of the options available to them. The debate also highlighted that any new system will need an increase in funding to ensure the sustainability of a new market place, and to finally make personalisation an effective reality – an interesting prospect given the current political clambering to make spending cuts.