Easter 'should be time of hope'

Easter should be a time for renewed hope, especially for the elderly, according to Mr Hugh Faulkner, the Director of Help the Aged. He plans to extend Help the Aged's work for old people in need at home and in the Third World.
A special Easter appeal for funds will be launched this weekend to provide funds for building and equipping hospitals, work centres and the rehabilitation units in Britain, and establishing feeding and medical schemes overseas.
Mr Faulkner explained: "In this country, Help the Aged wants to bring hope to elderly people in need of rehabilitation after serious illness, to those needing the fellowship and activity of a day centre, and to all those simply in need of release from that acute and terrifying loneliness and sense of being abandoned in society, which is the tragic lot of so many elderly people in Britain today.
"Overseas, we must bring this hope to the literally millions of destitute old people who need clothing, medical care, shelter and food it they are to stay alive."
Mr Faulkner also argues that support of the elderly through charities by itself is not enough.
In a letter to Mr Healey, the Chancellor of the Exchequer, he proposed that there should be an immediate increase in retirement pensions to half the average earnings for a married couple or one-third for a single person.
He stressed that the drop in income experienced by most people upon retirement came as a very unwelcome shock. "It is easy to forget the trauma of a man on average earnings of £69.30 who finds overnight on retirement that his income has been reduced to f28 for himself and his wife," he said.
Religious disaffection among the elderly is becoming a grave problem in British churches, according to a survey just published by Age Concern. The survey shows that only one in eight of those over 75 are involved in any sort of churchgoing or church-based social activities. The elderly who live by themselves are twice as likely to have contact with the churches as those living with other people.
The survey also found that church-based old people's clubs often fail to provide the sort of companionship which is needed. Old people would prefer simple neighbourliness to organised jollity.