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| The Conservative Party Election 2010 |
The Conservative Party's manifesto Invitation To Join The Government Of Britain is available here. It outlines policies on pensions and supporting older people, the family, and health.
Proposals include:
- Working with local councils to introduce a two year Council Tax freeze to tackle rise in cost of living.
- A pledge to pensioners to protect: the winter fuel payment; free bus passes; free TV licences; disability living allowance and attendance allowance; and the pension credit.
- Re-linking the basic state pension to earnings.
- Greater use of direct payments and individual budgets, which give people real control over their care.
- Making sure patients can get all the best new drugs they need for free on the NHS;
- Making sure people have access to a GP in their area from 8am to 8pm seven days a week;
- Fight hospital infections and mixed-sex wards by providing more single rooms in the NHS;
- Introduce a voluntary insurance scheme so that people are no longer forced to sell their homes if they need residential care.
- Supporting the removal of the default retirement age in principle; retirement should be a process and not an event.
On 18 April, the Conservatives launched a manifesto for older people - access a summary here. Read the full 'Invitation to Older People' manifesto. Proposals include:
- Work and equality. Work to stop discrimination against older people and introduce better support for older workers who lose their jobs, by:
• Looking at how to end the retirement age to promote fairness in the workplace.
• Scrapping the effective obligation to buy an annuity by age 75, to give people greater control over their finances.
• Providing specialist back-to-work support for the over 50s.
- Greater financial security. Protect pensioners’ benefits and create new forms of help to promote more independence and security, by:
• Protecting key benefits: the Winter Fuel Allowance, free bus passes, free TV licences and the pension credit. And unlike Labour, we will not scrap Attendance Allowance or Disability Living Allowance for the over 65s.
• Providing a better basic state pension by linking it to earnings in 2012.
• Freezing council tax for two years in partnership with local councils, saving a typical Band D pensioner household over £200 a year.
• Giving more help to lower fuel bills through a ‘green deal’, helping to tackle fuel poverty.
- Health and independence. Health and social care that is fairer and more flexible, reducing the increasing isolation and vulnerability of elderly people, by:
• Protecting NHS spending so it has the resources it needs to meet people’s rising expectations about the quality of care they should receive.
• Providing single budgets, combining social and health funding, to give older people direct control over the care they receive.
• Scrapping Labour’s jobs tax, and using the £200 million a year this will save the NHS to create a Cancer Drugs Fund – making sure that everyone has access to the cancer drugs their doctors think will help them.
• Devolving public health budgets, so communities can spend money to prevent older people getting ill in the first place.
• Making sure that no-one is forced to sell their own home to pay their care home fees.
• Delivering better palliative care to people at the end of their lives.
- Family and community. Greater recognition of the important role that older people and grandparents play in their communities, and more opportunities for older people to take a more active part in building a stronger, more family-friendly society, by:
• Getting older people involved in new programmes of civic action and volunteering, at the vanguard of a new army of activists who will help build the Big Society.
• Creating new powers for local communities to save community assets, like post offices, that are of great value to older people.
• Giving greater rights to grandparents after parental break-up or in cases where a child needs to be taken into care.
This page will be amended as more information becomes available. |
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Links
to facts and figures about the UK ageing population:
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