25 February 2008 16:19
IF ANY area of housing policy is in need of a long-term strategy it is accomodating an ageing society. By 2026, the number of people over 65 will rise by 47%, over 75 by 61% and over 85 by 88%.
So today's launch by Gordon Brown of the National Strategy for Housing in an Ageing Society is both long overdue and to be welcomed. The implications of such a population shift are enormous and will affect all tenures and areas of public policy that go well beyond housing.
The main proposal in the strategy [more detail on the CLG website here] is the adoption of the Lifetime Homes standard by 2011 for public housing and (as an aspiration) by 2013 for private housing. The government will review take-up in 2010 and introduce regulation in 2013 if necessary.
That sounds expensive at a time when housebuilders are also to cope with building more homes, funding more affordable homes and making them zero carbon and will alarm many of them.
However, the measures involved are more about making it possible to adapt new homes (planning space where a lift could go, for example) than actually adapting them and some are already included in Part M of the building regulations and Housing Corporation scheme development standards. The CLG estimates the cost at only £546 per home.
The National Housing Federation welcomed the strategy but criticised the lack of a definite commitment to make Lifetime Homes apply to all homes. Given its continuing disagreement with the government over public/private status it may also not be too pleased to see housing assocaiton homes described as 'public housing'.
The strategy is not just to do with new homes though. It also includes new approach to housing advice and information including new rapid repairs and adaptations services and reform of disabled facilities grant and an increase in funding.
Neither may be as headline-grabbing but both are vital. A few hundred pounds worth of improvement work can be as important as £100,000 of grant to build a new one to the elderly person that it enables to live an independent and dignified live.
However, at first glance the increases in funding involved seem welcome but modest at best: £35m over three years for information and advice and rapid repairs, when both will lead to savings in public spending elsewhere; and £45m over three years for disabled facilities grant.
Under the government's housing health and safety rating system there are 7.9m non-decent homes - 6.8m of those in the private sector. The system takes into account the vulnerability of the occupant when assessing risks like overcrowding, dangerous staircases and excessive cold.
Many vulnerable elderly people are in private rented accommodation, and the government has promised to consider them in its independent review of the sector this year, but many more are homeowners. That implies a need for a fundamental review of that perennial poor relation of the housing world: private sector renewal.
Posted by Jules Birch, Feb 25
Posted in Housebuilding, Older people