THE suggestion that elderly residents of what was once sheltered housing should have to push a button to alert the world that they are still alive sounds dehumanising.

Where traditionally wardens in sheltered housing would knock on the door and check all is well and maybe ask their residents whether they had taken their medication, now those same tenants in Glasgow Housing Association (GHA) complexes are only likely to get such a visit if they don’t press the Alertacall “OKEachDay” button on their telephones.

Glasgow Health and Social Care Partnership, which took the decision to ring down the curtain on sheltered housing in the city defends the move. Many of those allocated sheltered housing do not actually have a social care need, the council says. They don’t necessarily want a needless knock on the door of an evening when they are watching the telly.

Those who do need a social care package will still get it. But the goal is to ensure scarce resources reach those who most need them, and to ensure people can continue living at home for as long as possible.

In the past, according to a paper presented to the city’s Integration Joint Board, by social work chief officer Susanne Millar, explaining the so-called “older people’s transformational change programme”, the city has in the past been too patrician and risk averse. “The tendency has been a times to ‘do for’ rather than enable people to ‘do for themselves’,” she said.

And to be fair, she doesn’t paint the latest changes as easy: “significant savings have already been realised ... with most of the relatively straightforward options already having been realised.”

Meanwhile GHA, which has written to affected tenants to tell them about the new system, says there is still likely to be a social area in each complex, with social activities on offer.

The landlord, while Glasgow’s biggest, is only one of the city’s former providers of sheltered housing. All similar providers in the city are having to decide what to do in the absence of sheltered housing funding.

For most smaller housing associations the offer of a £2m pot from the HSCP to fund alternative provision was one they couldn’t take up. Successful bids could only be made by those set up to deliver social care provision as well as housing.

Nevertheless most of those which previously provided sheltered housing have managed to preserve it, often by raising rents (which largely increases the burden on the housing benefit budget – talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul).

That isn’t done out of stubbornness, but two factors – the fact the public tend to value sheltered housing and the reassurance it gives them, or relatives and friends, that someone is being looked after. And a belief – one housing providers haven’t persuaded the HSCP to take on board – that human contact matters more than can be measured by a simple assessment of need.

Amid all the concern about the isolation of many elderly people and the health costs of loneliness, it seems somewhat reductive and possibly reckless to replace the daily checks of wardens with buttons, however friendly.

It is hard to prove that sheltered housing prevents people deteriorating and needing more complex and expensive care, though many in the housing association movement believe it. But we, and Glasgow, may be about to find out.