I was a voluntary Home Visitor with Age Concern (as it was then for 10 years) and I find Jeremy Hunt's simplistic analysis really irritating. I did meet lonely older people in my work but the causes were rarely that they were being ignored by those around them.
One man I visited presented himself as a forlorn widower, devoted to his dead wife. I discovered later, by chance, that he was a vicious bully who beat his wife and children and had just been banned from the local pub for threatening people with his walking stick. No wonder he was alone and lonely. There have always been bad parents whose children want nothing to do with them once they are grown and independent. Vicious violent people and bad parents grow old just like everybody else and do not become charming, likeable or less violent nor good parents just because they are old.
Many older people I met had family who cared about them but work had moved them away from their childhood homes. I met children making heroic long week end trips to visit parents and even more, unable to visit even weekly, who rang to speak to parents regularly and did everything they could to make sure they were well cared for. These older people do need help to get out and meet other people, but please do not blame the children.
Jeremy Hunt also forgets that older people used to their own homes and independence do not want to give that up and go and live in the spare bedroom or converted garage of a son or daughter, assuming they have a room spare. The days when granny shared a room with the children is, thankfully, long gone.
When my mother died an Egyptian friend asked if my father would be moving in with me and was taken aback when I said HE wouldnt contemplate it. He lived 80 miles away, was completely independent and quite capable of looking after himself and his home and had a very active and busy life and many friends who had known him and my mother for 20 years or more. The last thing he wanted to do was give up his home, friends and social life to live in my back bedroom.
Other older people complained of loneliness but rejected every effort to help solve their problem, refusing offers of transport to Social Centres, having a befriender visit or taking part in any local activities.
Nowadays I doubt if anyone goes into a care home if there is any alternative. I have been involved with three relations who moved into care. One chose to move in a home after a spell in hospital following psychiatric treatment for depression and self neglect. The other two, well social services decided in their wisdom that two disabled people both with advanced dementia were safe to be left at home with three half hour visits a day. After 6 medical interventions in the 3 days, after the most severely demented one returned home from hospital, plus a heroic carer who stayed 5 hours one night trying to get my aunt upstairs to bed and me doing a 40 mile round trip twice a day to check on them, I decided enough was enough and they went into a care home.
Sorry to rant on so long but silly speeches from government ministers on topics in which they should be better informed, make me furious