‘It shouldn’t just be us doing this’: The Cheshire care home serving lunches to the lonely

Ivor Simmons may be 95 and living in a care home, but he is as concerned as anyone about the forthcoming general election – the 25th of his lifetime. “They’re full of promises that won’t come to fruition,” says the smart former head teacher and Royal Air Force veteran, who has seen everyone from Winston Churchill to Margaret Thatcher come and go. “No one has been here, no pamphlets have been here, we don’t know who the candidates are.”

Happily, because I am having lunch with him today, I can help: I offer to Google who the candidates are for him, so he can think about whom to vote for in his Cheshire constituency of Congleton, which has been Conservative since it was created in 1983. “The candidates should tell us,” he says, stopping me. “[A journalist] shouldn’t have to find out for us.”

“We won’t find out about the candidates until we get our postal voting cards,” chimes in fellow resident Barbara, who is sitting opposite Ivor and speaks with a warm Northern Irish accent.

It’s no surprise that the general election is the topic of discussion this week. What IS a surprise is that I don’t actually know Ivor or Barbara – I’ve come to meet them at Lawton Manor Care Home in Church Lawton, a sleepy village that straddles the Cheshire-Staffordshire border, to take part in Don’t Dine Alone, an innovative initiative to eradicate isolation in a lovely but lonely parish.

The scheme offers a free, three-course lunch every Wednesday for anyone who prebooks in advance, and is a lifeline for the local community as much as it is for the care home residents.

Take amateur artist Joan, who is sitting at the table next to us. The 70-something lives just a short drive away but is relishing this opportunity to break bread with new people under the care home’s roof. “When I am at home on my own, I constantly feel lonely, but I push it to the back of my head, look at my book or do a bit of painting,” she says.

“I don’t feel sorry for myself all the time. I think, ‘This is your life, you’ve got to make the best of it.’”

It is Joan’s first time at Lawton Manor but she’s in good company: she’s sharing a table with a polite local called Trevor – he lives a few miles away, but is a regular at these lunches.

“It shouldn’t just be care homes that are doing this,” says Trevor, who offers a hearty greeting on arrival. “For every home that cares, you should open your home up to your neighbour.”

Joan reckons that when she’s in her own home, she usually sees 10 people in a week. But she meets three new people in an hour at today’s lunch.

“I have neighbours that are quite nice, but I have had to stop my walking as my memory is going,” she says. Was she nervous about coming today? “No. Because somebody said they’d come and fetch me, and I thought, ‘Ooh, I’ve got somebody to talk to, I’ll go.’”

On today’s menu is a potato and garlic soup, followed by a fruit platter, then a turkey and ham pie, served with vegetables grown in the care home’s garden. Guests arrive at the elegant reception of this former Victorian manor before being led to a dining room full of ornate ceramic animals that have been made locally – the pottery city of Stoke-on-Trent is just eight miles away.

We are a week away from D-Day celebrations and the room is festooned with Union flags, but Lawton Manor is proudly, quintessentially, British all year round. Cylinders of tea dominate the dessert tray, and the air is filled with a soft hum of accents from all four corners of the nation, from received pronunciation to a light Staffordshire drawl. A fish-and-chip-themed Don’t Dine Alone is on the cards, due to popular demand.

The scheme, which was launched last year, has clearly united a community. But chef Nick Mason is sad that it needs to exist at all. “You’d wish there would not be that many lonely people living locally that are eating on their own. You can say it is a bit surprising,” he says.

“We make sure we are organised, we treat them in a respectful way, because obviously they are only coming here because the poor people haven’t got anyone else.

“If you are just at home looking at four walls, it is not going to be good. I know, as I do that at the minute – my son has moved away. And I’m only 54, and have been doing that for just a couple of years. So imagine what it is like to be doing that every day, with no one calling you, no one coming to see you – it must be awful.

“So if you can come in here for a few hours, have a chat, have a laugh and a bit of a joke with a nice meal, surely it is going to lift your mental health. It’s no hardship for us here to give them a bit of hope, and a little bit of life, which is what we all want for our loved ones. You wouldn’t want to think of your mum sitting at home on her own all day without speaking to anybody. That must be heartbreaking. If we can do anything to help with that, then why wouldn’t we?”

Data from the Office for National Statistics shows that the number of people aged 65 and over living alone in 2021 was 3.3 million, up 14.6 per cent since 2011. According to Age UK, before the pandemic, around one in 12 people aged 50 and over in England was reported as being lonely, equivalent to around 1.4 million people. That is predicted to reach around two million people by 2026.

“We know that loneliness is a bit of an epidemic now, and it goes unnoticed in a lot of communities,” says Kristen Fitzgerald, who oversees the Don’t Dine Alone sessions at Lawton Manor and two other care homes owned by Barchester Healthcare. “We’ve noticed a lot of people like to keep their head down and crack on, especially as they get older – they don’t like to ask for a lot of help.

“We know that because this is such a small village, there are an awful lot of people we identified, non-Lawton Manor residents, who we knew would probably benefit.” In 2021, nearly 40 per cent of Church Lawton’s 2,188 population were aged 65 and over.

Chloe Cameron, who heads up all the activities at Lawton Manor (the most recently launched is the free Knit and Natter), even drives members of the community to and from the events for free; some are located half an hour away.

“Don’t Dine Alone was originally an idea to combat loneliness over Christmas,” she says. “I have two elderly neighbours, and they don’t have much family, so I cook for them every Sunday. I hope somebody could do things like that for my mum, when she gets to that age. So I thought, if I could do that at home, it is something I can introduce at work. It has helped our residents feel a lot more confident talking to people they don’t know.”

Ivor is keen to meet people “with interesting backgrounds, who can talk to us about their backgrounds” from the carousel of diners coming through the doors.

“Older people should not feel ashamed of being lonely. It is a natural feeling,” says Ivor, who served as a pilot in the RAF from 1948 to 1968.

“Everybody is going to feel lonely at some point, even a child – it is one of those things. It is what you do about feeling lonely that matters. I listen to music as I find it consoling. In particular, classical music. It helps because of familiarity, it is music I used to play on the piano. I’ve asked for a piano to be put back in here, to add to a greater scope of entertainment. At the moment, the only entertainment we get are people coming in playing guitars.

“There are people restricted to their rooms that we never see,” adds Ivor, referring to the 37 residents who are unable to socialise, as they are bed-bound, before reflecting on the care sector more broadly. “Generally people can be treated like little infants.”

The problems bedevilling social care have been widely discussed for decades, of course. Care fees have not stopped rising during the cost of living crisis, but the Conservatives want to cap social care costs at £86,000, a plan that was due to be implemented last year but has now been postponed until October 2025, should they win the general election. Meanwhile, Martin Green, the chief executive of the charity Care England, recently warned against Rishi Sunak’s plan to ban immigrant care home workers from bringing over their dependants. Last year, The Telegraph reported that one in 10 care job vacancies “remained empty”, and disclosed that the Government underestimated how many care workers would come to Britain by a factor of 10.

The diners here are concerned about those vacancies: “Raise the wages,” says Barbara. “They don’t get paid enough for what they do.”

“The staff are very good here,” agrees Ivor. “But the wages are so low.”

With murmurs of a £12-per-hour minimum wage for care workers being proposed by a prospective Labour government, and a £2 rise proposed by the Liberal Democrats, their wish could come true.

Not that Ivor – who doesn’t like television – will know, what with the lack of election print material.