OLDER people should have a legal right to access all public services offline, Age UK said today.

The charity conducted research on the challenges posed by the shift to a “digital-first” approach in essential services such as healthcare and finance.

A survey of 1,000 people over 60 found that a third believe life is harder than it was five years ago because more services are online.

Some 53 per cent of respondents felt frustrated when they were recommended to access services on the internet rather than in person or on the telephone.

Twenty nice per cent said they felt left behind, while 38 per cent called the shift to online services “ageist.”

Age UK charity director Caroline Abrahams said: “Many older people have told us how stressful and annoying it is now for them to do basic things like book a GP appointment if they are not online.

“As digital approaches are increasingly the norm in all areas of our lives, not using computers is too often a recipe for struggling — or completely failing — to access the public services to which we are legally entitled, whether we are online or not.

“At Age UK, we think it’s time for older people to have a legal right to access public services offline if they don’t use the internet.”

The research also indicated that those in the most deprived areas could be the hardest hit by the shift to online provision.

It found that only 52 per cent of older people living in the most deprived 20 per cent of England use the internet every day, while this figure rises to 80 per cent for those in the least deprived areas.