The Hidden Housing Crisis: An Interview with Lord Best

People are also proud or shy about coming forward, and the amount of help available is limited. Improvement grants to help upgrade property were abolished some years ago, but disabled facilities grants still exist. Funding for accessibility is also still okay, because everyone knows that if the home is inaccessible then that increases the need for social care – or the likelihood of accidents that will cost the NHS.

But otherwise if you are an owner-occupier you are pretty well on your own in a lot of respects. There aren’t funds that will put in new central heating for you, even if that would save substantially on heating bills. So, it’s a tough world for the owner-occupied elderly person in poor conditions.

How will the challenges change with future generations?

At the moment, renting in later life is not a crisis but it will become so as the years pass and the demographic of older people in unsatisfactory homes being largely owner occupiers changes.

‘Generation rent’ is coming through, people for whom home ownership has become financially too difficult to achieve – and these are the ones who are going to run into serious difficulty financially because the private sector absorbs more income than social housing. When people retire, their incomes roughly halve and when that happens, a large number are not going to be able to stay in the private rented accommodation they’re in at the moment.

They will have to downsize to somewhere secure, with lower rents. But where are all these homes? We estimate 1.5 million extra people over pension age will be living in the private rented sector in 25 years’ time and that the income required to pay the rent for at least 630,000 of them will be insufficient to allow them to remain where they are.

So, government has got to get more generous about paying housing benefits and it is not minded to do that – we’ve seen freezes, cuts, ceilings and caps on housing benefit – or people are going to need to downsize to somewhere else that doesn’t yet exist.

The APPG’s report Rental Housing for an Ageing Population tells us that we need to be heading off the crisis now – by creating social housing that’s secure, long-term and relatively inexpensive.

Why is supply not keeping up with demand in terms of building social housing for older people?

This is a crisis that is building slowly and it’s not until people are actually have nowhere to go, that a [housing] crisis becomes very open and real. When I was Director of the National Housing Federation in the 1980s, 40 percent of new homes built by housing associations were sheltered housing; now that figure is down to about five percent.

The major house builders such as Persimmon and Barratt Homes do a miniscule amount for older people because that’s not the market they’re interested in. And it’s not the market that the housing associations concentrate on either. So, we’re neglecting the bigger picture because of the immediate crisis for younger households, and this will catch up with us in the next two decades.

Is it a uniquely British thing to stick our heads in the sand and what could we learn from other countries in dealing with later life housing issues?

I led an exercise in which we visited seven other European countries and looked at how people behave in later life. In most, it was a natural thing for people at 55 or 60 to say, “we are rattling about in a place that’s too big for us. Now’s the time to move into something more suitable for the next 25 years, so we don’t have to move out again – and we may be able to cash in on some equity as part of the process”. Whereas the British attitude is to hang in there and say, “they’ll have to take me out in a box”.

Culturally home ownership has been so important to us that we postpone moving until it becomes impossible to hang in there any longer, by which time of course, we don’t get much choice in the matter. We are then under pressure to move quickly and possibly even to go into residential care.

Future generations with a greater rental profile, however, will see things differently. I think there will be great willingness to move by those in the private rented sector, for whom rents will suddenly become extraordinarily burdensome. But the social landlords need to be getting their act together now and producing the homes suitable for people to move to.

Along with infrastructure, what else does a successful national rental strategy demand?

To make it work, one has to be more interventionist in the marketplace. Planners need to see demographic change coming and say to house builders that – for example – within a 500-home development, they want two blocks of 25 homes specifically for older people.

And it requires more of a push from central and local government before we can expect any greater changes. Leaving things to the market and to big house builders is never going to produce the right result.