What if engagement worked for people at every stage of life?
Imagine older people not just consulted, but genuinely shaping the places and decisions around where they live.
We’re all ageing. The person with decades of experience navigating public services, attending community meetings, watching neighbourhoods change: that will be you. Yet, right now, the people who've seen what works and what doesn't over decades, who've used these services through different life stages, who know which community spaces thrive and which sit empty, are often the ones shut out of shaping its future
Across the UK, local authorities are committed to becoming age-friendly. The Centre for Ageing Better is leading much of that work, tackling inequalities in ageing and helping make workplaces, homes and communities more inclusive of older people, while building an Age-friendly Movement so that society sees ageing in a more positive and realistic light. They support a network of over 100 councils with resources including an age-friendly communities handbook, a mapping tool, a community survey template, guidance on local data sources, and a series of built environment guides.
But there is a gap. These tools help councils understand what needs to change, but what’s needed next is how to meaningfully engage older people in deciding those changes, both through dedicated engagement mechanisms like older people's forums, and by making existing council consultations genuinely accessible to people they currently exclude. How do you move from processes that unintentionally shut people out, to practices that genuinely involve them?
That's where this toolkit comes in.
Built with older people, not just for them
We have partnered with The Centre for Ageing Better, a range of local authorities, and VCSE organisations to develop practical guidance on engagement mechanisms specifically designed with and for older people.
Rather than write it from a desk, we built it the way we know good engagement should happen: starting with lived experience. That means a review of existing evidence, interviews with local authority officers and third-sector organisations across the country, and workshops with a wider group of councils to understand where engagement with older residents was succeeding and where it was falling short.
But most importantly, we ran workshops with older people themselves, asking directly about the barriers they had faced trying to engage with their councils, and then working with them to shape the solutions they believed would help. Key sections were tested and reviewed with multiple local authorities and groups of older people before publication, and most of the quotes you’ll find throughout come from those sessions.
You need to feel like you are needed and you need to be able to see your contribution when engaging with something straight away. It also needs to feel relevant to you, and something we can all unite around.
That sense of being needed, and of seeing what happens next, sits at the heart of everything the toolkit covers.
What’s inside
The toolkit helps councils establish engagement approaches that actually reach older residents, make existing consultations accessible to people currently excluded, and build ongoing relationships rather than one-off exercises.
It takes local authority officers through the full engagement cycle, starting with a short self-assessment to help them identify their starting point, and a framework built around the IAP2 spectrum of participation for being honest about how much power they're genuinely sharing. From there, it offers guidance on making the internal case for investment, and detailed, practical advice on planning, accessibility, and facilitation, including how to reach older residents who are too often left out through digital exclusion, rural isolation, caring responsibilities, or language and cultural barriers.
It also covers what happens after the engagement itself: how to embed older people’s involvement into governance and services rather than treating it as a one-off exercise, how to close the feedback loop, and advice on when a council can’t act on what it hears. Throughout it draws on case studies from councils already doing this well, alongside a set of editable templates councils can put to use straight away, like an engagement brief, venue and accessibility checklist, a facilitation plan, a "you said, we did" reporting template, right up to an evaluation framework.
If you work for a local authority or third-sector organisation and want to talk through how it could work for you, get in touch with [email protected].
You can download the toolkit below. Make sure to visit Ageing Better's website to find out more.