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Despite them being a very good and beneficial idea, it is now widely accepted that meals-on-wheels are an unaffordable luxury in an age of austerity. Since 2008, therefore, most meals-on-wheels services have been rationalised to ensure optimum effectiveness and value for money, with this scarce resource carefully targeted at those most in need.
Such has been the success of this approach that now more than 1.8 million pensioners receive a pork pie delivered on a roller skate, a tasty soup in a woolly hat or a complete five-course meal piped into a beach ball and bounced through the ground floor window of their choice.
Special measures have been taken where those over 80 are concerned, and in Grantham, for example, all octogenarians have been formed into a ball so they can be rolled onto the pavement to directly access the communal cottage pie as it’s pushed past their home in a wheelbarrow.
The money saved through this programme will be invested in other age-related projects, such as recarpeting the Ministry of Pensions, upgrading the commodes in the House of Lords and refurbishing the royal boxes at Ascot, Wimbledon and Henley.