Peter Townsend Memorial Conference

Alan Walker, University of Sheffield

Alan Walker is Professor of Social Policy and Social Gerontology at the University of Sheffield. He joined the Department of Sociology in 1977 and has been a Lecturer, Senior Lecturer and Reader in Social Policy. He was appointed Professor of Social Policy in 1985 and was Head of Department from 1988 to 1996. He directed the £3.5 million ESRC Growing Older Programme, 1999-2004, and the UK National Collaboration on Ageing Research, 2001-2004.

Alan is currently Director of the £20 million ESRC, EPSRC, BBSRC, MRC and AHRC New Dynamics of Ageing Programme and is also Director of the European Research Area in Ageing and is spending most of his time on research. Nonetheless, he still supervises a large number of postgraduate students and was until recently the Research Director for the Social Sciences Division in the University. He is an Academician of the Social Sciences Academy and, in 2007, was given lifetime achievement awards by both the Social Policy Association (SPA) and British Society of Gerontology (BSG).

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I would like to start by congratulating David Gordon on organising this conference and assembling such an incredible range of speakers throughout the day. He asked us to reflect on Peter’s contribution to the sociology and social policy of later life and to outline the remaining academic and political challenges. The last time I did a version of this, Peter was sitting in the front row.

You have heard something about Peter’s legacy already, of these three books: a stunning analysis of family life, of institutional care and the first comparative study that was conducted in the field built a large part of what we refer to as the sociology of old age. An averagely good academic would have built a rather good career spanning at least 40 years based on these books, simply recycling what was done originally back in the 1950s and 60s but, of course, Peter was not content to be one of those. These books are three absolute classics of the genre and each of them could be claimed as a magnum opus by a higher than average academic — stunning books. Each of them was mould-breaking and created a new strand of research, each made important policy contributions as we have heard already. I think, buried within that, there is a very important rebuttal in the Family Life of Older People of the functionalist theories that were prevalent in the 1950s, arguing that the family was breaking down. Peter proved scientifically that that was not the case and that is really a foundation point, not just of gerontology but of social policy as well. We have heard about the harsh institutional regimes, importantly within the young welfare state, and the argument for community care. Peter demonstrated comparatively that a more enlightened approach to older people and old age could be introduced, that it was politically feasible. That is a compelling message that we need to bring to the front of all our arguments for improvements in policy. The last of those books was published 41 years ago. So Peter had finished what was good enough for an academic career 40 years previously — amazing. Each of those books is beautifully crafted in his classic prose.

I have just picked out one example of that prose and Peter’s fantastic ability through all his work to move from the particular to the general. So here is a very specific case of institutional care. This is about the freedom, democracy and prosperity of so called advanced societies which is absolutely classic throughout Peter’s work, and there are very few people, even today, who can do that.

There are two further important Townsend contributions to the understanding of later life. First of all his theoretical canon, again constructed mainly in response to acquiescent functionalism, and the development of a theory called ‘disengagement’, that older people would move out of mainstream society when they retired. This was a major plank in what is called the political economy of ageing or some of you may know it as critical gerontology.

Secondly, he highlighted the fact that the majority of disabled people are over pension age. He was implicitly criticising the dominant image of disability in society and its stereotype and this set him against the Labour Government in the 1970s and 1980s, particularly against his old friend Barbara Castle, who maintained in the Department of Health that disability was an inevitable part of later life. Peter said that was simply unacceptable. Of course, we should also mention that Peter campaigned for social justice in respect to later life from the 1950s to the present day.

So now to the unfinished business. There are two academic aspects to this and one political. With regard to the social gerontology research agenda, the political economy paradigm is now mainstream, but there has been a recent cultural turn in gerontology which has tried to disparage Peter’s work on structure and is swinging the pendulum completely in the direction of agency. However, the attempt is unsuccessful and Peter still stands as one of the remarkable contributors – as witnessed by the fact that his paper from 1981 — is still the second-most widely read in the journal Ageing and Society. It is a key reference point across the years.

Secondly, Peter’s pioneering study of family life has led to many others on the same topic but sadly not in the same mould. This is because you find more focus in the research now not on the social but on the psychological and individual wellbeing. There is a heavy concentration on individual responses to ageing, rather than seeing older people as part of the social world and understanding their relationships. That is a serious downgrading which we will need to argue about and Peter’s seminal work is a very important part of that argument. In other words we need to restore the social in place of an excessive focus on the individual.

Thirdly, the new science of ageing is a multidisciplinary science, and social gerontology needs to be a part of that, and not set apart. It needs to engage with biologists and engineers and all the others that you need to put together in order to understand later life in all its facets.

Now, in terms of social policy, I think also there is work to be done here because ageing is not recognised as a major theme of research and scholarship in social policy. Of course, older people cannot be ignored – they are the biggest users of welfare services — so older people are always part of the agenda. However, the adjustment is a relatively minor one. Pick up any introductory text to social policy and, of course there will be a section on older people but not on ageing and the significance of the life course and the way that the transformation in the life course is changing the dynamics of social policy. So I encourage social policy colleagues to engage more with the life course, with issues such as life course accumulation I think the separation between social policy and social gerontology is damaging. Maybe there is ageism in social policy just as there is ageism everywhere else in society. Social policy also needs to engage with the multidisciplinary science of ageing.

And finally, the political challenges — these are massive and Hilary has already hinted at some of them. I think the most important is to get later life inequalities onto the political and policy agenda because those inequalities are continuing and, in some cases, worsening. Life expectancy, the fundamental indicator of health inequalities, is worsening and that is not acceptable in an advanced industrial society. If Peter was here he would say exactly that. So we need to get this issue onto the agenda. Policy Press have recently produced a book entitled Unequal Ageing which tries to address the causes of unequal ageing and what might be done about it. We have to find new ways of tackling class based inequalities, gender based inequalities and race and ethnicity based inequalities. And that is simply not at a sufficient level on the political consciousness to call forward a programme of action. We see the ‘two nations’ in old age based on differences in class, race, gender and so on. In addition, ageism has, so far, not been sufficiently addressed, not thoroughgoing enough in terms of political programme and political ambition.

We urgently need new political priorities if we want to tackle the injustices of social policy with regard to later life in this country. There should be a poverty reduction target. At least we have one in the case of children and, of course, I would not dream of arguing against that but there should be one in the case of older people rather than a mealy-mouthed PSI target. There has to be an explicit target to reduce poverty in later life. Secondly, we need strong anti age discrimination legislation not the rather weak version that is currently moving through Parliament. And thirdly, most importantly, we need to get prevention onto the social policy agenda, so that we see the causation of later life inequalities and injustices at earlier stages of the life course and put in place preventative strategies to ensure that older people are going to live a decent life when they reach old age. Fundamentally, we need an increase in the basic state pension, which is what Peter always argued for most strongly. Despite all of the extra pensions and benefits that older people can get access to, for two thirds of pensioners in the UK, the basic state pension is their main source of income. So it is fundamental — we need to do something about the basic state pension if we are going to overcome low income and poverty in later life.

I think if Peter was here, he would have bigger ambitions and he would want an age alliance to combat poverty, a new organisation to bring everyone together to set this issue on the policy agenda. There are key questions that we should be asking. Why is the UK the fifth worst country in the European Union in terms of tackling poverty in older age? Why is poverty in later life three times higher in the UK than in the Netherlands and six times higher than the Czech Republic — those are the questions that Peter would ask and those are the questions that, in his absence we need to ask of policy makers and politicians.

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Alan Walker, University of Sheffield

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