Older people have a stranglehold on family homes
This article explains
“One of the unspoken truths of Britain’s housing market is that today’s families have been locked out of the family home market by their own mothers and fathers. A report from recently launched campaign group the Intergenerational Foundation exposes the stark reality of Britain’s housing crisis. There are now 25m unoccupied bedrooms in British homes, and this number is rising at an alarming rate.
“Older people are living longer and staying in the family home rather than downsizing to more appropriate accommodation,” says the report’s co-author Matthew Griffiths.”
To me it really resonates with the article I have also picked out this week about fuel poverty. There will not doubt be amongst those 3000 fuel poverty related deaths this year a number of single elderly people living in large, largelly empty houses in rural England.
It is all too easy to dismiss single home owners or elderly couples in places with high housing prices and shortages of accommodation overall as blocking up the system or better off in a care home. The intersection of the recession – eroding the value of savings for the elderly, inflexible planning laws – which choke off housing supply and often poor local domiciliary care in some rural areas means that the reality is far more complex than might be inferred from this headline.
In some parts of rural England there is a genuine crisis affecting the needy, well-off ,elderly – if that is not an oxymoron, by which I mean people of illiquid means – ie property and little in the way of liquid resources to maintain a day to day lifestyle. Its time someone thought about how most imaginatively to deal with this issue through a joined up approach by the relevant public service providers at the local level.