Don’t blame oldies like me if you can’t get on the property ladder
Michael Gove, the Housing Secretary, is very worried that young people who can’t afford to get on the property ladder will lose their faith in democracy unless something is done to help them.
Not that young people are renowned for their enthusiasm for the democratic process, it’s oldies like me who vote.
But it appears we are the villains of the current housing crisis. Our generation bought our houses when mortgages were affordable and property was comparatively cheap.
So the current shortage, with so many young people having to bunk down in their parents’ spare room, is basically our fault.
We are too mean to pay stamp duty. We have too much clutter to fit anywhere smaller.
We little old people are rattling around in huge family homes because we’re too selfish to move.
What a load of ageist rubbish that is. For years we oldies have been falsely accused of “bed-blocking” because older people stay put in hospital beds even when they are well enough to be discharged.
In fact that is because their homes are too unsafe to let them go back. Now we’re accused of “house-blocking”, when the truth is that millions of older people would love to move to smaller, safer homes, if there were any.
But there aren’t. Or not enough. We are terribly bad in this country at creating attractive retirement homes, the way they do in the US and Australia.
It’s not a new problem. Back in 2017, the think tank Demos reported a couple of surveys which showed that millions of older people would like to downsize if only they could find smaller, safer homes.
The report estimates that “between a third and a quarter of older people in the UK are interested in downsizing generally, and a quarter are interested in retirement housing specifically – this equates to at least 2.95 million people aged over 65. Yet there are only 720,000 of such properties in England and Wales”.
That was in 2017. There are even more older people today as the population ages, with what one government minister charmingly called “the graph of doom”. That’s us.
So it’s in everyone’s interest to build nice, safe, comfortable homes for us, ones that are cheaper and easier to manage.
Because if developers and local authorities provided enough homes for older people, that would free up the top of the housing ladder for families and the ripple effect would go all the way down to the homeless young people at the bottom, who are also desperate for suitable affordable housing.
Demos made a few financial recommendations, such as removing stamp duty if an older person is downsizing and giving incentives to developers and local councils to build retirement housing.
According to their report, the shortage of housing for older people “has a stagnating effect on the entire ladder by trapping older people in large family homes, when many are seeking to downsize into suitable or specialist retirement property”.
Which isn’t good for us, they say, because “hundreds of thousands of older people are stuck in unsuitable homes, which has a negative impact on their health”.
So we fall or freeze, end up in hospital, and lo and behold, become “bed-blockers”. I’m not pretending for a moment that downsizing is easy.
Moving house has been listed among the three worst moments in life, along with divorce and losing your job. Upsizing, on the other hand, no problem at all.
You just push all the clutter you don’t want to think about into the back of a cupboard and leave it there for the next 40 years.
Then with luck Stacey Solomon will come along, lay it all out in a warehouse and count your vases. When I downsized a few years ago, a professional declutterer hired by my anxious children opened a cupboard and said: “Esther, why have you got 250 vases?” To which I replied, “You can never have enough vases”.
Between us we got it down to six, but they started breeding again in my new flat, and I suppose I’ve got around 20 vases now.
Actually, in pursuit of journalistic accuracy I’ve just counted them, and I have 52. Which is handy, one for each week. I just hope I never have to downsize again.
To make sure it sells and you can release your capital, you’ll have to consider “staging” your old home.
I know you love it the way it is, but just watch the makeover, auction, house doctor programmes on television and you will see that everything these days has to be monochrome and minimalist.
When I sold our family house the estate agent told me not to bother “staging” it, a new owner would pull it to pieces anyway, so don’t waste time trying to second guess them.
But I think you must invest in a little primping and polishing, just to show you haven’t let it rot for years.
So I sorted out the shower room, and the cloakroom, gave it a lick of paint and made sure the lovely views over Hampstead Heath were neatly framed. And it sold. To very nice new owners who pulled out everything I’d done and changed it entirely.
So my estate agent was right, but would it have sold if I hadn’t made an effort to stage it? Who knows.
So, Michael Gove, I agree that our young people must be looked after properly, but so must the old.
First-time buyers are important, but so are last-time buyers. Instead of blaming us, helping us to downsize and stay comfortable and safe would save the NHS a fortune, and free up our old family homes for new families to enjoy.
And, would anyone like a vase?
Esther Rantzen is a brand ambassador for Churchill Retirement Living and was a spokesman for Chill, the Campaign for Housing in Later Life.
