Similarly, here in Wales, Plaid Cymru made numerous references to hope as part of their campaign messaging ahead of the recent Senedd elections, including in the opening lines of their manifesto.
In many ways, this focus is timely: following nearly two decades of uncertainty and upheaval, many people are understandably finding it difficult to look to the future with confidence and optimism, something recently reflected by an Age Cymru survey which found 40 per cent of older people are not optimistic about the year ahead.
Hope is important and can be hugely powerful, enabling us to imagine better ways of doing things, determine how we get there and inspire us to work towards this.
But this focus also inevitably frames action and progress as something that will happen in the future, shifting our attention away from what can be achieved today and tempering our expectations.
The Prime Minister’s announcement on social care – described as ‘offering hope’ by a number of commentators – is a good example of this. While the announcement was both welcome and important, little detail has been shared about what the immediate response to the issues facing social care services will be, and what this might mean in terms of consequential resources and support for Wales.
As highlighted in my recent briefing paper on Social Care in Wales, action across a number of key areas would improve people’s experiences and the quality of care and support without the need for significant reform (although this does remain important).
Yet it seems that older people experiencing issues with social care today may be waiting a long time to see the improvements they need to enable them to live safely and independently, and have the best possible quality of life.
Many older people have bluntly described to me the reality that they don’t have ‘many years’ to wait for change, while others are understandably cynical about what will actually be delivered, given that successive governments have promised significant social care reform that has failed to materialise.
The growing emphasis on hope is understandable: people want reasons to feel optimistic about the future, while politicians want to offer a clear and positive vision. But offering hope must not become a substitute for the practical action needed to address the challenges people are facing today or used as a way to defer difficult decisions with the promise that things will be better ‘one day’.
Delivering tangible improvements in the here and now is therefore crucial, because for many older people, hope is not measured by promises about tomorrow, but by what changes today.
Rhian Bowen-Davies is the older people’s commissioner for Wales.
