A ten-point plan to transform Oxfordshire into “an age- friendly county” will be unveiled tomorrow.

A package of measures, including proposals to create councils of elders across the county, are set out in a report from Oxfordshire Age UK.

The study highlights serious levels of inequality between rich and poor pensioners, which it says see Oxfordshire’s elderly living in two separate counties.

Entitled A Tale of Two Counties: Growing Older in Oxfordshire, the report is being launched tomorrow at the Ashmolean Museum, with leading health service figures and the city’s two MPs attending. Recommendations range from a drive on benefit take-ups to more community support for people with dementia.

And it offers backing for a revolutionary new system being introduced across Oxfordshire giving pensioners their own personal budget “to buy” the help they want.

The action plan calls for a council of elders to be set up in every town, with local councils and health trusts expected to attend and support the new forums, where pensioners could express their views and concerns.

It also proposes the creation of senior campuses in at least one school or college in every district, where pensioners could learn to use the Internet.

The report found that only 38 per cent of people over 65 have ever used the Internet, a valuable means to access services and combat loneliness.

A scheme involving student volunteers from Oxford Brookes University teaching computer skills has shown the huge benefits, says the report.

It says: “Older people are looking for tuition. Young students are keen to teach or gain work experience.

“At a cost of about a £100 a day, it is a win for the old, the young and the public purse.”

Other measures proposed in the ten-point plan include:

  • A private-public sector partnership in every town to ensure accessible meeting places, transport schemes and public toilets.
  • An employers’ charter committing leading local employers to “nurturing senior talent and not scrap it at 65”.
  • Health, wealth and skills checks for people in mid-life.
  • A county-wide campaign to create “Friends of Dementia”
  • An extension of the Connect programme, where stroke sufferers help train other stroke sufferers, with the principle extended to other areas.

Paul Cann, the chief executive of Oxfordshire Age UK, said he hoped the report would encourage people to view the county’s growing elderly population as a “demographic triumph, rather than a demographic time bomb”.

In his introduction, Mr Cann said little progress had been made towards addressing huge variations in life expectancy, health and “access to a decent quality of life in retirement” since the time of the Cutteslowe Wall, in the late 1950s.

Mr Cann writes: “Cutteslowe’s infamous ‘snob wall,’ separating the Cowley workers on their housing estate from the well offs in North Oxford, might have been demolished. But the underlying inequalities remain.”

The report also estimates some 7,000 people, most of them over 65, suffer from dementia, with only about a third having being diagnosed with the condition.

It also points to particular problems in rural parts of the county, with almost half of rural Oxfordshire doing badly in providing access to key services.

Mr Cann said: “Difficulties of income and poor health are made worse by limited access. Nearly half our rural areas are in the worst tenper cent of the country in terms of access to services such as GP practices and supermarkets.”

The report found that about ten per cent of older people feel lonely, while four in every five older people feel ignored by society. It is predicted that roughly an extra 30,000 residents aged 80 and above will be living in the county by 2031.

In 2008, it was estimated there were 28,400 people over 80 living in Oxfordshire.

He welcomed news that a system giving pensioners the chance to decide themselves on the assistance they should receive, piloted in north Oxfordshire, is to be rolled out county-wide by the county council.