Mayor of Greater Manchester, Andy Burnham, has said that he wants the region to “be a pioneer” in improving the lives of older people within stronger communities.

Delivering a keynote speech to the International Longevity Centre (ILC) Future of Ageing conference via video link, the mayor outlined his ambitions to use the region’s forthcoming £630m integrated settlement to improve elements of health and community services, transport and housing within the devolved region.

He also spoke about the need to support older workers, about reforming the way the ill-coordinated benefits and pensions system currently discriminates against people who reach the state pension age, about helping people with care needs to stay in their own homes for longer, rather than ending up in hospital, and about making research in dementia and other illnesses that affect many older people “a national priority”.

Burnham said the UK must find a way to fund social care “that doesn’t create a clash between a free at the point of use NHS and a social care system that is fragmented”. “If we leave the system as it is more people won’t get the support they need,” he warned.

He described plans for investing in housing, including multi-generational, “attractive, age-friendly” neighbourhoods in the middle of Manchester and the towns that surround it.

He also outlined his ambitions to create a fully integrated public transport system; a “Live Well” service that would connect people who have unmet social needs, and might otherwise attempt to address these via the NHS, with other services that can meet those needs. These might be linked to housing, debt, or the effects of bereavement, for example.

Better housing would be “the foundation” for the overall strategy, Burnham claimed, saying the aim was to create more housing that would be “attractive to the under 25s and the over 75s”, allowing residents “to access all the things that make life worth living”, without older people feeling they had to be in a separate retirement home-filled area – although such developments could include assisted living facilities.

Burnham also spoke about the problems he and his family had faced in caring for his father, who is suffering from dementia, and called for a greater focus from government on researching the treatment of sufferers from these and other degenerative conditions, saying this “should be a national priority”.

Without action to address each of the issues he had mentioned, Burnham warned, “the lives of older people will get worse and worse".

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