Mortality rates for elderly people are rising across the country. Initially, the authorities blamed merely cold weather.
Invisible march of death: Londoners routinely wore
masks in the smog-riddled 1950s as a Tory government refused to tackle
lethal air pollution. Photo: Monty Fresco/Hulton Archive.
[...] In 2012 and 2013, government influence and lack of action, rather than external factors beyond its control, again might have contributed to a rise in deaths. Again the deaths are taking place at a time of austerity and again the government of the day would prefer to be able to point the finger at some “influenza-like illness” – blame the cold when it wasn’t that cold – rather than a cause that it could tackle. This time it is austerity itself that is being blamed, but no one is quite sure whether more people are dying now because they cannot afford to heat their homes or because they are getting worse care when elderly. There might even be an unrecognised “time bomb” suddenly reducing the generation’s life expectancy, as cigarettes did in the past and obesity might do in future; but it seems unlikely. All we do know is that more people were dying in 2012 and 2013 than in previous years.
We also know that recessions are not usually linked with rising mortality. In the past, numbers of deaths often fell during recessions as fewer people worked in dangerous industries due to lay-offs. More recently, falls in road-traffic accidents were recorded during the early years of the recession that began in 2008, as fewer people could afford to drive. But today appears to be different, or at least different for the elderly.
Between 2008 and 2013, cuts led to some 483,000 old and disabled people in the UK either losing their care support or becoming no longer eligible to claim it. According to the Personal Social Services Research Unit, the “reductions … are particularly acute for older people”. There are now millions fewer social care visits a year to the elderly than took place five years ago. These are visits to elderly people who would have been assessed as vulnerable, visits that could result in the carer setting in motion a course of action that leads to the prevention of an unnecessary death. The biggest cuts to visits came after the general election of May 2010...
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