Housing: Affordability

Lord Best Excerpts

Wednesday 22nd January 2014 Lords Chamber

[Lord Best (CB)]

My Lords, I thank the noble Baroness, Lady Ford, very much for initiating this debate and I pay tribute to her sterling work for regeneration and housing over many years.

I have two interests to declare and two bullet points to make. First, I am president of the Local Government Association and, in that capacity, I strongly support the LGA’s efforts to remove the current cap on council borrowing for housing purposes. Secondly, I chair the Hanover Housing Association. My second bullet point comes close, I think, to being a silver bullet in the quest for an increase in the availability of homes that the next generation can afford to occupy.

The Hanover@50 website displays the input from nine national think tanks on questions of housing and care for older people. In summarising these contributions to the debate that Hanover organised to mark its 50th anniversary, I contributed a 10th chapter, called, “Accommodating our extended middle age”. This addresses two of the most significant problems facing the UK: first, the escalating health and social care requirements for those in later life and, secondly, the acute shortages of homes for younger households. The proposed solution to both problems is to build attractive, well designed homes for those in their extended middle age—55 to 75 years-old—and create a sea change in attitudes in the UK to downsizing or “right sizing”.

If even a modest proportion of the rapidly growing number of older, single people and couples living in family homes could be enticed—by spacious, light, energy-efficient new homes—to downsize, there would be huge gains for them and for the nation: improved health and well-being for movers; liberation from looking after bigger homes and gardens; reduced accidents in the home or illnesses linked to cold or damp; and pre-empting, postponing and preventing loss of independence and enforced moves into expensive residential care in later life.

Downsizing retirees can access wealth by releasing equity, and this can pay for care, assist the next generation or simply fund happier retirement. Standards of living can be dramatically improved, and the setting of “sociable housing” for those in extended middle age can reduce the likelihood of loneliness and isolation, which are the chief causes of misery and mental health problems for older people.

However, these gains are equally for younger households. A shift in culture, whereby we downsize at a younger age, instead of waiting for a crisis when we hit our 80s, brings much-needed family housing, often with gardens, on to the market—usually for relatively low-cost sale. It frees up existing social housing for families at social rents, which means lower housing benefit costs that are hard to achieve when building new affordable housing. It even provides for those aged between 55 and 62 who need to move to avoid the dreaded bedroom tax.

I commend to the Minister and her colleagues the recommendations that flow from the Hanover@50 debate: building homes that attract us in our extended middle age can head off problems for our old age while enabling tens of thousands of younger people to move into family homes that they can afford.