Nice to know that our "cool" Government, with its emphasis on youth, really does care for the Seniors after all. Well, hasn't it proved it with its "passport for pensioners", launched this week, which sets out a list of the rights to health care, benefits, housing, personal safety and travel and leisure facilities?

The aim of this exercise is to ensure that older people obtain access to the public services they need to help them stay independent for longer - because, of course, an independent older person makes far fewer financial demands on the Government than does one who needs to be funded in residential or nursing-home care.

That's great as far as it goes. But let's hope that the Government now follows through and provides the resources to make the services listed on the "passport" more than a pipe dream.

There is no point, for instance, in talking about support for old and infirm people in their home if all that turns out to be is someone to give you a bath on a Thursday afternoon or do the shopping for an hour a fortnight when what you really need as well is the flat cleaning, the sink full of washing-up doing and your laundry seeing to.

Social Services departments have some difficult decisions to make, given their limited funding and growing demand, and the outcome doesn't always match up to the promises made by the Government.

A new ministerial group has been appointed to co-ordinate Government strategy for older people and provide them with a stronger voice in Whitehall. The first thing it needs to do is look at the expectations raised by the "passport for pensioners" and persuade the Treasury to part with the cash to turn them into a reality for everyone.

The new report on the future of pensions provision, published last week, has discouraging things to say for millions of people who can apparently expect a huge drop in their standard of living when they retire and others who are so poorly paid they will never be able to become "stakeholders" to boost an ever-shrinking basic State pension.

More encouraging is the report's rejection of the "demographic timebomb" theory which suggests that the country will soon be unable to support its elderly population. Apparently pensioner numbers are now stabilising.

So if that's the case, if things aren't going to be as bad as the pundits have been trying to panic us into believing, let's have a bit less of the scaremongering.

This is a prosperous country. It's awash with money. So there's no reason at all for continuing to make people feel guilty for growing older because they are going to put an insupportable burden on the rest of the population. That's rubbish!

Once we accept that all retired people are entitled to live with dignity and in comfort (if not luxury), there's no reason at all why the country shouldn't be able to rearrange its future financial affairs to allow them to do just that.

Converted for the new archive on 30 June 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.