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Rupert Bates Y
ou reach a certain age, find yourself on a sunny Australian beach where you can’t hear or see the cricket, and thoughts drift towards retirement – early, very early, retirement I hasten to add.
Before you break out the Bollinger and bunting, it’s not going to happen. I can’t afford it for a start and, admit it, you’d miss my whimsical ramblings.
PROPERTY COLUMNIST OF THE YEAR
Silver
But it made me think about getting old, something that is as predictable as a Daily Telegraph scare story whenever there is the threat of a new home being built. There’s an irony there. The Telegraph is the mouthpiece of the NIMBY and yet it is their ageing readership crying out for new homes to meet a demand and a demographic imperative that is alarming in its scale. Often it takes someone from outside an industry to spell it out and say it as it is. Step forward Esther Rantzen with a column in this month’s Show House. I say ‘outside an industry’ but Esther (she is one of those national institutions that does not require a surname) has actually stepped into the housebuilding industry with aplomb, launching the HBF’s Campaign for Housing in Later Life. She was also, along with Age UK chief executive Tom Wright, a guest at the What House? Awards and both are on the judging panel of the Churchill Awards that I chair, accolades that honour excellence among the over-65s and run by Churchill Retirement Living.
When it comes to the elderly the housing ladder disappears like an Indian rope trick, leaving our senior citizens to tumble into A&E and add to the burden on the NHS
Writing in Show House the That’s Life! presenter – the long-running BBC series that triggered my enduring love of puns and innuendos – says there is “a disgraceful lack of housing appropriate for older people”. When seeking to solve the housing supply issue, everybody looks at the first rung of the ladder and ways to get the young into home ownership, whether they can ultimately afford it or not.
But when it comes to the elderly the housing ladder disappears like an Indian rope trick, leaving our senior citizens to tumble into A&E and add to the burden on the NHS.
The statistics are extraordinary. There are only around 100,000 specialist retirement properties in the UK to buy, with an estimated 3.5m older people looking to buy or rent them. According to research by think tank Demos, £400bn is tied up in the homes of the over-60s who want to downsize. A lot of Britain’s retirement housing is done very well by specialist operators who know their market, but can find themselves penalised by perverse planning charges and local authority inertia.
Clearly you cannot lump everybody from 60 to 90 into one category and there are many people with acute medical needs that hotel style apartments in the woods with a communal lounge, a bridge club and a hairdresser’s are not going to cater for, or be able to care for.
But surely health providers working closely with developers could ramp up the supply of homes to staircase levels of care. Planning needs to be addressed too, with councils having to be aware of an older generation looking for accommodation that unlocks their capital and affords them continuing independence but not isolation. This in turn puts more homes into the market place for younger families to move into. The over-60s own £1.28 trillion in housing equity in England alone. In other words the money for new retirement housing is there already.
While there is a misconception that housebuilders are simply carpeting green fields, when a large proportion of their work is in fact brownfield, older people, unless they are dowager duchesses stubbornly refusing to give up the leaking family pile, want to live on brownfield sites. As Esther points out, they want towns and public transport, or a chemist or grocer they can walk to.
“Old people keep town centres alive and vital,” writes the founder of The Silver Line, the charity helpline for older people. Better, more appropriate homes, imbued with a community spirit giving residents the right support, means better health. This negates the argument that housing for the elderly is a drain on local health resources. Equally, they are not going to put pressure on school numbers, are more likely to use the local shops than an out of town supermarket, and pub landlords will be able to retire early on the sherry sales alone. The elderly have a lot of votes and they cast them.
rb@globespanmedia.com twitter.com/rupertbates
sh showhouse January 2014 | 07
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