When I was younger – much younger! – and at school, I took part in a volunteering scheme to call on older people – whether they wanted me to or not!

Subsequently, I worked on a hospital radio station and did programs from the wards, and then was a volunteer at a local hospital giving out menus – but really spending time with patients undergoing rough treatment and holding their hands if they didn’t have family – and sometimes sitting with them while they died.

Deep in me it instilled not only the benefits being engaged in positive activities – but a life-long memory of not just how good it was for the recipients – but how it made me feel too.

So I’m glad that we’re having a discussion about how positive volunteering can be for young people, and how it can fit into the wider emphasis on education and skills.

Young people have a lot of bad notices thrown at them – condemned in the media almost daily, criminalised by our justice system and often let down by an education system that so often sees young people as exam statistics fodder rather than as human beings. And all that is without even getting started on the peer pressures of commercial acquisition.

But look at many volunteering organisations, and you see young people bounding in energy, enthusiasm and altruism. More than that though, I believe volunteering is so important it should be at the centre of local communities because it helps to empower young people.

Volunteering can play a large part in building cohesive communities so that young people feel a valued part of them – and hence take part in them – rather than them feeling that they are out on a limb and their community’s biggest inconvenience.

They can bring their enthusiasm, creativity and imagination when they are engaged in constructive, productive volunteering projects, and this can have a rejuvenating effect on local communities, as well as bringing a whole host of benefits to the young people that take part.

For example, in Nottingham, when it came to revamping the 70 year old, unattractive, concrete Market Square in the centre of the city, the council made sure that young people were involved in all stages of the process for selecting a winning design.

And volunteering can be an education in itself. It can provide young people with a whole range of skills that not only increase their employability, but also equip them to deal with the challenges they will inevitably face in life – leadership, teamwork and prioritising tasks.

Taking part in more specific projects can also equip young people with skills that are directly related to employment, such as design skills from producing a magazine to a catering qualification from volunteering at a kitchen for the homeless.

For those young people who succeed in formal education this is a great way for them to pick up all those transferable skills that employers constantly talk about and complain that nobody has! In a crowded labour market it also gives them a distinct advantage over their peers who have no experience outside of academia, and therefore helps employers to choose the best candidates for their vacancies.

Another advantage, which I think is often overlooked, is that volunteering develops young people’s confidence and maturity so that they feel able to face the challenges of formal education head on, and are often capable of making much more intellectual contributions than if they had not been volunteers.

But volunteering can also have a profound effect on those young people who are let down by formal education. It gives those young people a second chance at developing their potential in a way that our formal education system sadly doesn’t allow.

It’s an alternative way to earn recognised qualifications, for young people to build their confidence and start believing in themselves again, even if formal education has left them feeling worthless and undervalued.

Volunteering can be an innovative way of learning and by getting so involved in a project where they feel valued and where they think that they’re making a positive contribution, they don’t realise how many skills they’ve learnt or how much they’ve developed whilst taking part.

Of course – we need to get much better at selling volunteering. Volunteering has had a bit of a bad reputation in the past as it’s been seen as nothing more than free labour, and people think that they may well end up just on tea duty! But it’s nothing like that any more. It’s so much – so much more engaging, involving and adventurous and rewarding and complicated.

With volunteering being so great, the obvious question is: how to we encourage more? We need to encourage stakeholders to promote volunteering more. This includes formally accrediting volunteering – making it easier for employers, educators and young people themselves to see the benefits that can be gained from volunteering.

For goodness sake – even the government has realised that volunteers bring something to the table that the statutory arm cannot. There is nothing like volunteering for the good of people, for the good of the individual and for the good of the cause.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008

I didn’t get called to speak during the Liberal Democrat conference debate on our crime-fighting policy paper, but this is the speech I would have given.

The bitter irony of the debates around crime in this country is that so often those policies presented as being tough on crime are also those that not only do the least to cut crime – but actually increase it.

Because often we are faced with this choice: do you wish to be vindictive about past crimes, or effective at avoiding future crimes?

Punishing for the sake of punishing may meet instinctive emotional repugnance at the people who carried out awful acts – but punishment that spirals out of control in a bidding war over who can be toughest just results in more reoffending and more crimes.

Let me explain: imagine before you someone who has committed a crime. Should they be jailed? If so – for how long? And how should they be treated in jail?

In ever-raising stakes bidding world of being tough on crime, the answers are always more jailings, longer sentences, worse conditions.

But what will happen to that person? For the very worst crimes – yes they will be locked up for the rest of their lives. But for the rest – at some point they’ll be back in our communities. And will they reoffend? If they are simply locked up and forgotten – so often the answer will be yes. And it will be scant consolation for their future victims to know they were heavily punished for a crime in the past.

So we need to be smart – not just tough – and be effective – not vindictive.

If your kids did something wrong and you locked them up in a room for a few years – do you think they would come out as develop, well-balanced, better behaved, sorry and repentant for their misdeeds – or would they be sullen, maladjusted and resentful and angry – with no new ways or means to deal with the pressures of life next time something tempted them from the straight and narrow?

The answer is to balance punishment with rehabilitation, to use jail where necessary and appropriate – but not to mindlessly send everyone into the universities of crime for any offence.

So – what is effective?

Community Justice Panels are effective. Chard Liberal Democrats pioneered them. Young people have to face up to the consequences of their actions and then make amends to the community. Guess what – it works! The re-offending rate is just 5%! Proof and pudding. Liberal Democrats want to establish community justice panels in every town in the country.

And then there is restorative justice. That’s where victims and offenders are brought together and the offender apologises to the victim. It does sound wet. But it ain’t wet. It works. Proof and pudding.

I visited Brixton Prison about 18 months ago where a criminal – a serious criminal who had served a couple of decades – had come back to talk to the assembled worthies about what worked. Even for him at that end of the criminal scale – he said being faced with what he had done got through to him in a way that nothing else ever had.

It’s kind of redemption – even for the non-religious. The need to apologise and make amends runs deep.

So – effective not vindictive.

And it’s not just a few future crimes we can prevent – because re-offending rates for people released from prison are shockingly high.

Around six in ten prisoners released are caught committing at least one offence in the subsequent two years.

Amongst those who steal from vehicles, the re-offending rate is around nine out of ten.

So tackle reoffending amongst those who already get into the legal and prison systems – and there’s a huge cut in crime to be had. And of course because they’re already in the systems, we have the advantage of knowing who they are and where they – at least on the days the Home Office hasn’t lost another bundle of prisoner data!

We can’t go back in time and undo a crime a criminal has committed, but if we stop them re-offending – then we have zipped forward in time and stopped a crime before it occurs.

It’s time to get real, stop the posturing, catch the criminals – change their behaviour – and so – cut crime.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008

I wrote this article for the conference week edition of New Statesman.

The behaviour of much of the Labour Party reminds me of the two main characters in Waiting for Godot. Dump Gordon or get behind Gordon? No matter how many times a deadline has been rolled out for Gordon Brown to turn things round, the malaise limps on. Just as in Samuel Beckett’s play, where Estragon and Vladimir keep on deciding to do nothing – because it’s safer or because something else may yet happen – so Labour carries on, neither happy with matters as they are nor acting to change them. There is, however, a simple way for Labour supporters to break out of this cycle. They should stop worrying about whether or not to change leader and instead think about changing party.

A Labour voter who wants to see a fair tax system, one in which a chancellor of the exchequer will ask the very richest to pay a bit more to help sort out the tax-and-borrow mess we have been landed in, would get these from the Liberal Democrat Vince Cable. For most Labour frontbenchers the very thought of asking billionaires to pay more tax is somehow beyond the pale.

A Labour supporter who is looking for effective action on the environment will find it in the Liberal Democrats’ green tax switch policies, which are designed to change people’s behaviour – but not by landing them in a mire of regulation and not using greenery as an excuse to raise taxes for everybody. Instead, we will tax the bad things, such as pollution, in order to free up funds to cut taxes across the board, but with particular emphasis on helping the least well-off.

Those who remember when the Labour Party stood up for the rights of the individual against overweening bureau cracies might find sympathy with Liberal Democrat plans to scrap ID cards and reinforce the rights people have over their own data and their privacy.

I could go on (Iraq, anyone?), but the basic point is the same: on issue after issue, Labour has lost its way and forgotten those it was formed to speak up for and to fight for. Certainly the Liberal Democrats come at many of these issues from a different starting point from many core Labour Party supporters. We start with the individual, with liberty and with giving people more power over their own lives – all of which are very, very different from the Fabian-style, top-down, centralised social engineering that is Labour’s heritage.

But on issue after issue, it is now not a matter of two parties arguing over the best means to the same end. Instead, only one party, the Liberal Democrats, is still trying to achieve these goals. There is little sign of an intellectual debate in the Labour Party that would rectify matters.

Compare Labour’s current political troubles with those of the Conservatives in the 1980s and 1990s. At that time, the dissidents – most notably Michael Heseltine, post-Westland – had an alternative set of policies. It was most certainly about personalities – but there was also no doubt that a Heseltine government would have had very different trade and industry policies from the Thatcher government. Again during the 1990s, there were real differences of policy at stake in the Conservative Party – and so genuine hope that a change of leader or change of political direction might bring substantive change.

The same cannot be said of the Labour Party in 2008. Take Charles Clarke’s intervention (New Statesman, 8 September). What policy direction change does he really want, or what does his track record suggest? Perhaps a return to losing prisoners rather than losing data about prisoners, one might wickedly suggest. Is there a more substantive answer? I’ve listened to and read his words time and again, and beyond “I don’t like Gordon Brown” I can’t find one.

Labour’s supporters don’t have to play the “Waiting for Gordon” game any longer. The Liberal Democrats are ready and waiting to welcome them.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008

Thank you for inviting me to speak at this reception. It is an honour to be here celebrating 90 years of women and the vote. I am always still shocked to remember that there was a time – in fact a majority of the time – in history when we didn’t have the vote.

Now, the arguments made against extending the franchise to women 90 years ago seem preposterous to you and me today. I looked at the old Parliamentary archives of the debates around giving women the vote and I was taken with Sir Frederick Banbury’s comments on why women should not be allowed to vote. He said:

“Women are likely to be affected by gusts and waves of sentiment…Their emotional temperament makes them so liable to it. But those are not the people best fitted in this practical world either to sit in this House… or to be entrusted with the immense power.” [Hansard, 19 June 1917; vol. 94, c. 1645]

He was talking about the power that the vote would bring. Thankfully, he was in the minority, and, luckily and happily, I am entitled to be full of as much sentiment as I care to be.

But the role of women in politics and our representation seems to have stalled at giving us the vote and electing a few of us to Parliament, when it needs to move beyond that.

Sadly, I am one of only 126 female MPs in a Parliament of 646. Parliament remains an old boys club, with its adversarial style of politics where bully-boy tactics are the norm – any of you who’ve watched PMQs will be fully aware of this!

A small but telling example of the Parliamentary mindset: there was no objection to David Blunkett joking about his sexual exploits, but when I asked if all the fuss might be distracting him from doing his main job – oh no, that was inappropriate and not the done thing.

All very old boys club. And this feeds a political system that is so busy being adversarial that it forgets to be effective.

This lack of representation is repeated throughout our political system. In local government, women make up just over a quarter of local councillors, whilst with Euro-MPs it is a similar story: just one quarter female.

The quality of our government suffers from these imbalances – an impact which therefore affects us all, men and women.

Nowhere is this clearer than in the allocation of resources, where the macho boys culture so often summons up the massive project and neglects the important details.

When I was chair of transport at London Assembly it was starkly clear. Why is it that an obsession with boys toys – the macho game of whose got the biggest airport or the longest train – delivers multi-billion pound budgets for massive transport infrastructure projects yet not even a fraction of those budgets were spent on so called ‘soft measures’, such as making sure you can fit a double buggy through the door of a bus and making sure that local shopping centres and services are easily accessible – really easily accessible – through using public transport.

But it should not be a question of either or – it should be a matter of both.

Women need to be there, with men, making these decisions, to ensure that public services and policy are relevant to all people and are capable of having a real effect on the lives, not just of women, but of everyone in society.

Some of our Nordic counterparts are light years ahead in terms of female representation, and we can see the practical effect on policy and resource priorities.

Take Finland – with its childcare allowance for women who stay home and look after children under the age of 3 and its municipal care for children who are below the school age of 7.

But I don’t want to concentrate on the negative aspects of this issue today – after all we are meant to celebrating!

We have come a long way in 90 years. It’s not enough, but we are constantly pushing, and constantly forcing change. I hope that within the next decade we will able to celebrate the achievement of equal and proper representation of women in politics, as another 90 is far too long to wait for this change!

I would encourage every woman here tonight to at least consider taking the plunge and get involved in formal, elected politics, and for the men to support and encourage them all in doing so.

It isn’t enough that women have the vote, and it isn’t enough that Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan all rank above us internationally when it comes to women’s representation.

Equal representation and involvement in politics is our right, and it is the women in this room today who will bring about change tomorrow, by demanding the equal representation they deserve and by working together to achieve it.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008

Today I would like to talk about what fairness mean to us as Liberal Democrats and more importantly how we can achieve it.

As liberals I think we have instinctive sense of what equality means. This doesn’t mean we have all the answers or always get it right, but equality is one of the main reasons we get out of bed and fight the political battles we fight we do.

As a country, I think we’ve come a long way from lesbians having to hurl themselves off the House of Lords gallery to get their point across.

I know Chris Rennard in his speech is going to touch on the Conservative Party’s dodgy attitude to gay people in his speech, but publicly even they claim to have realised the error of their ways and eschewed the bigotry of social conservatism.

Indeed, the political consensus appears for the most part heading in the right direction. The post-1997 Parliaments have piece by piece removed many of the anomalies that saw gay, lesbian and transgendered people treated unfairly in the eyes of the law. There are still some laws that need changing, but Labour majorities with the willing support of Liberal Democrat parliamentarians have brought British law into the 21st century.

But when it comes to fairness for the LGBT community, does this mean we can hang up our capes and pat ourselves on the back for a job well done? Of course this is not the case. Unfair treatment sadly still remains an everyday experience for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The discrimination they face is perhaps not as blatant as before, but the consequences can be just as harmful to those at the receiving end.

To illustrate the challenge for fairness that faces us I wanted to choose three examples. They are:

1. The teacher that ignores kids calling each other gay as an insult
2. The Islington registrar who refused perform civil partnerships because of her religious belief
3. The BP boss Lord Browne being forced to resign because of his long-term affair with a male prostitute

Firstly the teacher. In some respects, education is the very much the last bastion of the worst of how society perceives and treats the issue of sexual orientation with the ‘not in front of the children’ mentality persisting.

I am sure many of you could imagine several racial or religious insults that would rightly be severely punished if overheard in the playground. So why is the word gay as an insult not treated with the same severity in so many schools?

And it’s not just about the immediate hurt caused by bullying that is let pass as acceptable – it’s also the longer-term message to children, as they are forming their views of the world and of how people should behave, that it’s ok to view gay as something objectionable and that it’s ok to make casual insults based on sexuality. That’s not a happy society we’re creating.

I know Stonewall has been hot on the case in tackling homophobia in education and our very own Stephen Williams has been leading the charge in our own campaign.

Changing attitudes must start in the playground and the classroom. Homosexuality is not an unmentionable awkward topic – and to treat it as such compounds the prejudice that there is something wrong with being gay.

The second case I wanted to discuss involves a registrar from Islington in London who won a case for unfair dismissal after she was dismissed for refusing to oversee civil partnerships because of her religious views. I don’t know if we have any councillors or activists from Islington here this evening that would be able to give their perspectives, but for me this case revealed a major fault-line in the battle for fairness.

Please don’t get me wrong – I am just a likely to be plucky and stick up for the right for one person’s religious freedom. But for me this freedom is guaranteed in the framework of a secular society. We could argue until the cow come home about the extent of religious freedom, but for me one thing is clear – when the freedom of the individual comes into direct conflict of religious belief of another, then individual freedom takes precedence.

There are many who see this issue differently, even within our party – a point demonstrated by a minority of MPs in all parties who voted for the amendment to impose the need of a male role model for women seeking fertility treatment in the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

Whilst some Parliamentarians wrangle with this issue and their moral compass, the practical implications of religious conviction undermining the rights of gay people are very real and act as an obstacle to fairness.

If we fail to combat erosion to principles of a secular society, it will not only be the rights of the LGBT community that will suffer. Millions of people rely this protection to live their lives in the way they want – from the women who has freedom over own body in deciding when she will have a child to couples freed from a loveless marriage because of the freedom to divorce. Not forgetting too those who – by being protected for the imposition of any one religion’s views – are therefore free to practice their own religion too.

A secular society does not just protect those without faith – it protects those with faith too.

So, I have looked at two bastions of the state – schools, religion. Finally, I want to look one last arm of the establishment -that of the press.

"Complaining about the press is like complaining about the weather." Wise words reportedly whispered from Tony Blair to his wife. And to some extent, I agree with him. A free press is a sign of a healthy democracy. However – sometimes what is in the public interest is a far cry from what sells papers.

Look at the case of Lord Browne being forced to resign because of his long-term affair with a male escort, over which he told a white-lie about how they met. Hardly the stuff of resignations, particularly when as the dust settled we saw allegation after allegation about alleged misuse of BP resources disintegrating under the microscope.

The truth is that the heart of the story was simply that the Mail on Sunday was able to out an extremely senior business leader after 40 years of him keeping his sexuality private. As a result he felt compelled to resign.

Decriminalising gay sex in the 60s prevented gay people from being the victims of blackmail. But it still seems to have some way to go before sexuality ceases to be a newsworthy for those who choose not disclose it.

Clearly we have some way to go until we reach complete fairness. As leaders in the communities we serve, Liberal Democrats must act to challenge and to change systems that are inherently fair – whether it’s the schools we govern, the registrar offices we control or the laws we can influence.

Public service providers need to be proactive in dispelling the perception from gay people that they will get worse treatment. Hopefully the next major steps in their transformation will come with the extension of the duty of public duties to promote equality for people of different sexually orientations.

And in the private sector we need to give force to their complaint, speeding up tribunals and making sure those who practise discrimination fear redress.

So we have gone a long way on this journey to equality and fairness – but equality under the law does not reach into all hears and take away the prejudice and hatreds which rest beneath well-behaved exteriors. That has to be the ultimate goal.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008

You may have read about the horrific crash of a coach into two flats at the bottom of Muswell Hill (in August 2008). Thank goodness no-one died, but it could so easily have been a different story if the accident had taken place at a different time or if the mother and baby at home had been in a different room at the time of the crash. Not surprisingly – residents of the flats now want better safety measures on the road.

Ever since I started stomping around Muswell Hill before becoming a councillor for the area in 1998 I have been campaigning with local residents about the problems of speeding and danger on this mega-dangerous hill with its extremely steep gradient. We have had some successes along the way – but not enough to prevent this accident.

Some bollards were installed a few years ago and finally – after about eight years of campaigning – a speed camera was installed on Muswell Hill about fourteen months ago, and anti-skid finish was also applied to the road surface.

This accident was caused by a coach going uphill, running out of petrol and being advised by the police to free wheel back down the hill. The vehicle went out of control, careered over the pavement – sweeping a bollard out of the way – and hit the flats.

So I arranged a meeting with the council and residents of the flats to try and get proper action taken to protect them from further carnage.

So – about six residents of the flats and two council officers (a head of traffic policy and an engineer) met with me on site. First question was – what more could be done to prevent vehicles going out of control?

The anti-skid surface that was applied last year apparently hasn’t taken and is deemed to have ‘failed’ – so the contractor will be obliged to come back and redo that job. The officers will also look at all sorts of records to establish causality – so that they can come back with proposals to improve the engineering to prevent it happening. No doubt the speed camera will have helped a bit – but clearly not enough.

The second thing they will consider is what measures can be taken to improve the safety should something go wrong and a vehicle go out of control? The hill and the camber make it virtually certain that under those conditions it is the bottom of the hill residences that are in line of fire.

So – we now wait for Haringey Council to assess the record and come back with proposals. It was a good meeting – and whilst passions are high – I felt that it was a positive meeting.

It may be that the funding for any improvements will come from Transport for London – in which case I have offered to nag at the highest level. But it may be that it will come out of Haringey budget. We will have to wait and see.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008

It can be truly terrible when a CPZ (controlled parking zone) is put in near you, but you are not actually included in it – and then everyone parks in your unrestricted bit and you then can never get anywhere near your own home to park. Never mind if you have young children, babies, buggies shopping or are older and mobility challenged – you will drive round and round and end up quite a distance from your own front door.

This was the case around Claremont Road and thanks to my Liberal Democrat colleague, Cllr Lyn Weber (Crouch End ward, which covers the eastern part of Highgate) and storming local residents, Haringey Council was eventually forced into putting a new CPZ proposal out to consultation – albeit at a snail’s pace.

I went to the publication of the results – and what was crystal clear was that some in some roads, including Claremont Road, life had become a living hell. Other parts of the consultation area had no problem at all. At the public meeting, Brian Haley (Labour Executive Member who makes the decisions) wouldn’t be drawn on saying yes to those in desperate streets – but in the end that is what he will have to do.

This brings me on to a real bit of Haringey Council insanity or incompetence – or both – in terms of CPZ introduction. Having introduced both the Highgate Village and Highgate Station CPZs, and extended the latter to North Road – they left out a relatively short stretch of road from both of those CPZs along part of North Road.

The trio of Highgate ward councillors (my Liberal Democrat colleagues Rachel Allison, Bob Hare and Neil Williams) have already led a long – but successful! – fight to get enough pay and display places outside the Highgate Group Practice on North Hill. And now they are battling to get this small left-out gap in North Road covered by a CPZ too.

The situation is an outrage as the Labour-run council only left this part of North Road without a CPZ by mistake. After pressure from Highgate councillors and residents, a consultation on correcting the blunder took place last year, and it received an overwhelming ‘green light’ from hard-pressed residents.

However, despite promises of action, nothing has been done, and Haringey Council is still refusing to set a date for the works, despite the short stretch of road, and the limited nature of the changes needed.

The latest excuse offered to Neil is that no funding has been agreed for the works, and it might be as late as March next year before residents get the parking control they have voted for and desperately need. Given how long it has taken to get to this point, you’d have thought they would notice before now that funding hadn’t been sorted – and have sorted it out long ago.

Truly dreadful!

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008

I think people would be quite shocked if anyone said that we are going to incarcerate 86% more 15-17 years, but that is what has happened over the last seven years.The lock ’em up mentality might create a moment’s comfort to those plagued by antisocial behaviour.But with scant resource to attempt any form rehabilitation, the few months respite communities get from their local ruffians being banged up are overshadowed when they are let loose again, particularly with all the new skills they have learnt on the inside.

Restorative justice isn’t a new idea, but it certainly is effective in bringing an offender face to face with the reality and consequence of his or her actions.Liberal Democrats would like to see a real investment in community sentencing and pilots of community courts in Liverpool have seen real results in preventing re-offending.With the Web 2.0 generation, why not rehabilitation 2.0?Programmes should be tailored to the offender.

Investment is really the key. While the Government seems happy trying to win the biggest prison award, the simple economics of restorative justice just passes them by.The fact is most five star hotels are cheaper than a night in youth custody centre.So imagine what that 86% growth in youth offender population could have bought in terms of rehabilitation.

Liberal Democrat councils across the country have pioneered Acceptable Behaviour Contracts (ABCs), an alternative to punitive and largely unsuccessful ASBOs that have led to boom in youth offender populations.An ABC used as an early invention tool will act to solve the causes of antisocial behaviour.The biggest difference is that the young people themselves are involved in setting achievable and realistic outcomes that are more likely to be stuck to.

In tandem none of these efforts will succeed if we do not take greater action to catch these criminals.Instead of pointless and expensive ID cards we need more police on our streets using an intelligence led approach to target young people carrying knives.Community policing supported by Liberal Democrats has reconnected police officers with the community they serve and allowed them tap into the wealth local knowledge.The success Operation Trident in dealing guns crime in black communities is down to working with not against the black community.A similar attitude to youth crime is likely to reap rewards.

In spite of government announcements or Conservative press releases, there really is no magic wand that will solve youth criminality in one go.Poverty, drug abuse and alcohol abuse will continue to be the leading causes.As policy makers we can never afford to lose sight of this fact.

This article appeared in the September 2008 edition of the Parliamentary Monitor.

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008

This summer recess I am trying to visit all the sheltered housing and homes for the elderly in my Hornsey & Wood Green constituency. It looks like the visits will spill over into the autumn, but the reason for making such a concentrated set of visits is that I want to reach out to people who often find it hard to come and see me in person to raise their concerns – and to hear at first hand what the issues are that matter the most in their day-to-day lives.

One issue coming up time and time again is foot care. It’s an issue that barely gets a mention in my normal post bag or in the media (even though NHS stories are not exactly rare) – but when getting out and talking to people, it’s clear there’s a massive issue here for so many people.

At heart is the stupidity of the NHS spending zillions on new knees and hips, or straightening out arthritic toes – but not similarly providing foot care for older people. Hard skin on your feet may not sound too bad if you haven’t suffered it, but my goodness if you or someone you know has – you’ll know how it can be just as immobilising as knee or hop or arthritic toe problems. But when it comes to hard skin – if you’ve not got the money to go private, you’re usually stuck.

After mentioning the issue on a radio program, I got an email from an expert who was listening. She said:

“I heard you briefly on the radio this lunchtime. Don’t know what the programme was – my husband was listening to music as we drove across town and I tuned in to the talky bit. What I did hear and wanted to applaud loudly was your bit about foot care for the elderly.

“I’m a physiotherapist, have worked in palliative care since 1991 … Many elderly people cannot reach down to their feet, cannot cut their own toenails (and carers and District Nurses, if they are lucky enough to have one, aren’t allowed to) apply cream or dry between their toes, so in growing toe nails and fungal infections are a huge problem. This often leads to a nasty skin infection called cellulitis, which causes further damage to the lymphatic system as well as making the sufferer systemically unwell. Foot washing, when you can’t get in and out of a bath, becomes a major operation and if you have been fastidiously clean all your life, as most people have, if you choose to seek help, you have to suffer the shame and indignity of revealing to a healthcare professional that this part of your personal hygiene has become too much for you. I suspect that a lot of people choose not to and suffer in silence.

“In our area the waiting lists for podiatry are huge and for many the effort of getting to an outpatient clinic is prohibitive. Taxi drivers have been instructed not to help to lift legs into vehicles in case they catch the skin and litigation ensues! So if there is no friendly relative available to provide transport, folk, who can’t manage to lift their heavy, swollen legs in and out of cars, become prisoners in their own homes.

“Feet become increasingly swollen (due to immobility), itchy (due to dry stretched and cracking/flaking skin), painful (‘bursting feeling’ and pressure from footwear), shoes become unwearable or dangerously boat-like – causing damage to the feet or leading to falls, and legs are heavy (try walking about with a litre bottle of water strapped to your lower leg – and many of our patients are carrying up to 6 litres of extra fluid in each leg!!!, causing muscle fatigue, joint strain and imbalance).

“So much of the above could be avoided by care and attention at an early stage, by the education of carers in sheltered accommodation about the need to look after the largest organ of the body -the skin, and encouragement and help with basic foot care and mobility issues for our elderly citizens, many of whom live alone and struggle on.”

I rest my case!

(c) Lynne Featherstone, 2008