Partnership – the sum is greater …

1. As a case history I want to examine in some detail an example of a particularly fruitful partnership between Help the Aged and the then newly privatized Eastern Electricity. Working together, the two public relations departments created an award winning campaign which was to be renewed and developed further two years later.

2. The seeds of the campaign had been sown some years previously. At its heart was the Charity’s awareness of elderly people’s fear of crime. Any successful campaign satisfies a need, or a perceived need. Help the Aged’s Community Alarm Campaign with its Home Safety successor, satisfied both. Apart from first hand knowledge gleaned from working with older people over decades, HtA drew on important sets of statistics.

3. The British Crime Survey found that a third of women over 60 and nearly one ten men over 60 felt ‘very unsafe’ on the streets. In fact, just 1.2 per cent of women over 60 and 0.6 per cent of men over 60 are actual victims of crime. Younger people are over three times more likely to be victims of street crime than the over 60s – even those who go out four or more evenings a week.

4. There is no simple explanation for this prevailing fear of crime among the older population. Blaming the media is not enough. Older people may fear crime more because of their relative isolation, or because of the greater difficulty in old age of simply ‘picking up the pieces’ again after an adverse event. Whatever the reasons, the perception remains among a significant proportion of our older population that they are likely to become the victims of crime. The majority, however, are not sufficiently motivated to take measures to increase their protection.

5. A recent MORI survey found a significant proportion of the older population were without basic home safety devices, 49 per cent without a mortice lock, 93 per cent without a spy hole, 46 per cent without a door chain and 63 per cent without window locks. Help the Aged believed that providing some of these devices and advising on their use would increase older people’s confidence. The balancing act would be to help them feel more secure and safe in their own homes without having to barricade themselves in so effectively that no one could reach them in an emergency.

6. Accidents and emergencies however, had provided the starting point earlier Help the Aged campaigns which had been mounted to counter actual rather than perceived need. Just over half (51 per cent) of pensioners over 75 suffer fatal accidents. Falls are the most frequent cause of the accidents. One in ten of those in the 65-74 age range group cannot go out of doors. This figure rises to one third for those over 85.