AGE Message to the Second Convention of the European Platform Against Poverty and Social Exclusion, Brussels, 5-7 December 2012
The European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion is one of the Flagship initiatives of the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. It was launched in 2010 and sets out actions to reach the EU target of reducing the number of people at risk of poverty or social exclusion by at least 20 million by 2020. The Second Convention of the European Platform against Poverty and Social Exclusion aimed to review the progress made towards reaching the poverty target and act as a forum for consultation on the upcoming Social Investment Package. This Convention also featured a broad call for support towards building a coalition across Member States, policy fields, levels of government, institutions and civil society actors for a more social Europe by 2020.
AGE took part in the event to highlight the important impact of the crisis on older people and stress the specificity of poverty and social exclusion in old age. Read more in AGE press release.
In its message sent to the EU Convention on poverty and social exclusion, AGE calls on the EU to:
- Guarantee adequacy of old-age income, whether provided through pensions or other minimum income schemes – in order to fulfil older people’s needs in terms of what they consider to be essential to preserve decent standards of living and personal dignity.
- Agree both EU and national level targets for poverty reduction breakdown by age and gender – in order to combat old-age poverty among specific sub-groups, such as older women, single older persons, older people in rural areas, ethnic minorities or older migrants.
- Respect the principle of civil society’s involvement in social policy making at national (through National Reform Programmes and Social Reports) and EU level (in the framework of European semesters) – in view of increasing the ownership and effectiveness of the policy implementation under the Europe 2020 Strategy.
The Convention was also the occasion for AGE to present its new publication‘Older People also suffer because of the Crisis’, built on the outcomes of the thematic seminar AGE co-organised with the Committee of the Regions on‘The impact of the crisis on older people’ on 19 June 2012 in Brussels (see section on AGE news).
A Commission’s report of the event is available here
