Retirement: ending employment means losing a special kind of recognition

Just back from Poland, with another experience of approaching retirement giving me cause to think.

For the past four years, I have had a contract as a visiting professor with Opole University in southern Poland, mainly for teaching and decorating their department with a social work academic who is well-known internationally. My second contract comes to an end soon, and it’s all change at the university, so it is not going to be renewed. So it will end shortly after I retire from my main job next month. So I’ll probably never go to that place that I’ve got to know quite well, or meet those people that I’ve met regularly for several years again. This has happened several times in my life, but it feels a bit different this time, and I’m wondering why.

It’s giving me a pre-retirement experience of giving up something that has gone on for a while, when there is no replacement of it in sight, and I have to say it doesn’t feel good. However, that feeling of 'not good' is quite irrational.

My experience of various of the visiting posts I’ve had in European countries over the years is that they lose interest in you after about four or five years, and whatever contribution you made in the early years has dissipated. Also, for myself, I find heavy teaching a bit 'not-me'; I’m not sure it ever has been me, and it’s certainly not now. There was some prospect of its being renewed, and I was feeling it was a bit of a burden, so it’s a bit of a relief that it will not go on, and it will leave me freer to do some things that I plan to do over the next few years. So my rational mind is aware of the positives of this ending

My experience of leaving all jobs is that you disappear from people’s radar very quickly. Whatever nice or barbed things they say at the time you leave, the water closes over your head, the minor ripples quickly fade away, and they never speak to you again. People at St Christopher’s, my main job in the UK, are saying things like: ‘what are we going to do about this when you leave?’, when they ask me to do something. But they will move on with never a backward glance to whoever takes on the things that I’m doing now: mainly they already have.

And in the past, I’ve left whole areas of practice behind. For a while in the 1970s and 80s, I was quite involved in mental health practice and services; now my expertise is very distant. No doubt it will soon be the same with palliative care, which I was never much interested in anyway. It has its place, but it’s not my main interest in the care services.

So why does it feel a bit different, now I’m coming towards retirement. I’ve been mulling this over and I think it must be because these areas of activity not being replaced by anything, or at least by anything with a job title and the assumed status that goes with it. I’ve got writing contracts coming out of my ears for a couple of years or so, and projects in the planning that I’m aching to get at as soon as I have more time.

But there is something particular about an organisation deciding to employ you and actually paying you regularly to do something they need to have done.

I’ve known for many years that other people’s recognition is an important motivator for me; you don’t get that in quite the same way when you’re not working.

Court of Appeal case on protecting older people from being bullied by their relatives

A fascinating decision in the Court of Appeal on a safeguarding vulnerable (older) people issue that is bang on what worries a lot of my colleagues in social work. What about someone who is vulnerable, and possibly being bullied by a relative, but still has mental capacity under the Mental Capacity Act 2005?

The case is: DL and A Local Authority & Others ([2012] EWCA Civ 253 IN THE COURT OF APPEAL (CIVIL DIVISION) ON APPEAL FROM Mrs Justice Theis [2011] EWHC 1022 (Fam)

In this case, it was an elderly couple who were being ‘overborne’ (exactly the right word for circumstances I've seen in the past) by their apparently rather controlling son who lived with them, so that it sapped their independent capacity to make their own decisions, even though they still had mental capacity to decide for themselves. Partly it was about controlling their lives, but it seemed also to be aimed at getting an early transfer of the ownership of the house and persuading at least one of the older people to go into a care home. Just the sort of pressure that carers at the end of their tether often feel is justified, but which is also a significant limitation of an older person's freedom.

There are lots of things that a local authority can do to protect people legally, and they’d really worked at this. The local authority: ’…has considered (and rejected) using the criminal law. It has considered (and rejected) an application to the Court of Protection under the Mental Capacity Act 2005 (MCA 2005). It has considered (and rejected) an application for an ASBO (an anti-social behaviour order) under the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. It has considered (and rejected) an application under section 153A of the Housing Act 1996’ (para 9). So don't let anyone tell you there's nothing they can do, and good on the local authority for working at finding a way through, even if it did lead them to the Court of Appeal.

The Appellant (the son) put up what you might call the neoliberal argument: that the court having power to act meant that everyone's freedom to act was being taken over by the namby pamby state. No way: what it is doing is protecting people who need protection: the job of the law across the world and across history.

The judgement makes the point that the ‘inherent jurisdiction’, that is, the common law duty of the court to protect people, still exists, even if the Mental Capacity Act was intended to be a comprehensive response to this sort of situation. This is because even people who are capacitous may still need protection, and the European Court of Human Rights and the Human Rights Act requires the Court to have protection available. this is one of the really important examples of why human rights law is so important to older people and to anyone who may be vulnerable to pressure from others in their family or neighbourhood.

You can guess what their son was doing by the interim injunction that was given:

…restraining the First Defendant from:

(i) assaulting or threatening to assault GRL or ML;

(ii) preventing GRL or ML from having contact with friends and family members;

(iii) seeking to persuade or coerce GRL into transferring ownership of the current family home;

(iv) seeking to persuade or coerce ML into moving into a care home or nursing home;

(v) engaging in behaviour towards GRL or ML that is otherwise degrading or coercive, including (but not limited to): stipulating which rooms in the house GRL or ML can use; preventing GRL or ML from using household appliances, including the washing-machine; 'punishing' GRL or ML, for example, by making GRL write 'lines'; shouting or otherwise behaving in an aggressive or intimidating manner towards them.

(vi) giving orders to care staff;

(vii) interfering in the provision of care and support to ML;

(viii) refusing access to health and social care professionals;

(ix) behaving in an aggressive and/or confrontational manner to care staff and care managers (para 9).

The judgement contains a very extensive account of the law, and several other cases, that many colleagues will find useful when advising older people on these problems. 

You can read the full judgement on the Internet, here: Report of Court of Appeal case.

Do not regret growing older

I thought this pic from 'Just Feelin' Good' reflected the Greyamble philosophy:

Facebook: Just Feelin' Good

Legal information services list - addition on older people

I keep a list of useful legal services that I use on the internet at CoSearch, and I've today added an extra one, Withers, which publishes an 'elder care' law update, which I find useful.

Too many impossible choices in retirement pensions

Government and people concerned about older people are beating themselves up about why people don't have better pensions - the answer, they should be beating themselves up because they've made it too complicated.

My head is spinning after talking with our independent financial adviser (I looked him up on the Financial Services Authority website to check that he was registered - can you do that for social workers? I'm not sure).

When I started in local government, it was clear: you contributed and the employer contributed and at the end you got a reasonable pension that reflected the progress you'd made during work life. Now, forty-odd years later, I have that local government pension, transmuted into a teacher's pension, covering a third of my work life, and will get an infinitesimally small state pension which nobody could live on. I also saved a bit, and have two other money payment pensions (see my earlier post about how these work).

Here are the 'or' choices, basically:

I could buy annuities for either one or the other, or both or combine them and buy one annuity. I would have to choose one or two providers of the annuities.

Or, if they were big enough, I could set up a fund of the money and draw it down when I needed it.

Or, I could defer them and buy the annuities later or set up a draw-down 'platform' to take them in stages later (thus involving myself in having to make continuing decisions about it for the rest of my life).

Or, I could add to one or the other or both of the funds to make them bigger and better.

And/or I could add to my wife's remaining fund to make that bigger and better.

I make that the original possibility and at least 11 ors: you count them and see if you can find some more, you probably can. And my wife has a similar number - another six or seven ors because she has one less pension fund to worry about. All in a situation where there is no certainty what is going to happen to the economy.

All of this nonsense has been set up, as far as I can see, to enable a few very rich people (richer than I ever wanted to be), to fiddle around with their affairs to extract money from the tax system and make their children richer still.

Or (this is another type of or) what the politicians are going to do. If I live the statistically average period, my decisions will have to cover the next 20 years of my life and I won't have much chance of earning to respond to anything that goes wrong. That means probably five successive lots of politicians tinkering with it. And they will be doing it in their political interests, not in the interests of my security.

In two words, it's obviously im-possible to decide.

The only answer must be a sensible size of retirement pension for everyone, responding to some degree to the economic circumstances of your life and career. That's what the next generation needs: it's obviously too late for me and my generation. And we are supposed to be the lucky well-off baby boomers. I think not, especially if you're not good at making decisions.

Dignity in care websites listing

I'm working on dignity in care: you might find my list of websites on dignity in care issues useful; it gives lots of connections to resources and reports.

Listing of useful websites on 'dignity in care'

Pension and retirement moves

Retirement is hotting up. The IFA (Independent Financial Adviser) whom we know from hospice experience is coming this afternoon to talk over what we do about pernsions that fall due when I'm 65.

And HMRC have sent a four-page form to check my position, mainly because I'm coming up to that age.

It's a big decision-making time, in which everything changes andyou're making dispositions that may affect you for 20 years or more. We're working steadily through it, but there are a lot of risks and few certainties, especially as the financial world seems in meltdown.

Still no news from the state pension though.

Our younger identity in the older person

Their younger identity is always still part of each older person.

This cartoon is from the Facebook site: Humor inteligente.

Mr Hodgson's new job: experience counts

What I most like about the new England football team manager's appointment is that the Football Association gave a big job to a man of 64 (an age when most of us have been regarded as too old for appointment to a new post for at least 10 years), and a job in sports at that. And they did it because of the breadth of his experience and his knowledge.

The newspapers who are saying that he did not do so well in Liverpool are missing the point. If you've been working for a few decades, you're likely to have more and less successful bits of your work. Why not look at someone's achievements?