Building a Society for all Ages
"Building a Society for all Ages", published in July 2009, brings forward a series of proposals to help instil a major cultural shift and help Britain prepare for demographic change which is seeing people live longer lives.
We are acting now to make sure that all of us – children, families, communities and service providers – are prepared to embrace the opportunities and challenges ahead.
Key elements of the strategy involve providing support to people to look forward and plan earlier for their longer lives, and making sure that services are suitable when the time comes to use them.
What is in the strategy?
The strategy outlines a number of new measures which include:
- The Active at 60 package and all-in-one cards to provide people with greater opportunities to stay active and involved in their later life.
- Bringing forward a review of the Default Retirement Age (DRA) which had been due to start in 2011 in direct response to a changing economic landscape. It also promotes flexible opportunities including 50+ self-employment.
- Digital inclusion projects to give different generations the opportunity and ability to keep in touch, and a Grandparent's Summit in the autumn to explore what more we can do to assess the needs of changing family structures.
- An interactive one stop shop for helping people planning ahead, to help people in mid-life to make decisions on financial, health, careers and other issues.
- A Good Place to Grow Old programme with a National Agreement to promote ageing issues at a local level, and an innovative service delivery fund to test new approaches to delivering services for older people.
- The new UK Advisory Forum on Ageing for advising ministers on further steps the Government and partners need to take at national level to improve well-being and independence in later life.
The proposals in "Building a Society for all Ages" continue the process of meeting the challenges and opportunities presented by our ageing society. They were developed through debate and discussion with organisations in the private and voluntary sectors and members of the public.
We consider it vital to their success that members of the public and other interested bodies should continue to shape their detailed development and implementation. To support this, we included a number of consultation questions in “Building a Society for All Ages”. We also held discussion events with the UK Advisory Forum on Ageing and over 600 members of the public across England and Wales.
Consultation response
The consultation response published on 2 February 2010 provides a summary of what we have heard both in written responses to the consultation questions and at consultation events. It also provides an update on how the initiatives set out in the strategy have developed as a result of this feedback.
Thanks to the constructive engagement of organisations from a number of sectors, we published “A Good Place to Grow Older – A National Commitment” as an annex to the response. This supports a local response to the challenges and opportunities of our ageing population. We hope that this commitment will help national and local government and their partners do more to listen to and address the needs of today’s older people and prepare for our ageing future.
- Building a Society for all Ages – consultation response (HM Government website)
