This old house

This morning, I almost agreed with the government.

No, I hadn’t suffered a knock to the head or taken to swigging whisky at my desk - I genuinely thought Grant Shapps might have said something vaguely useful when I turned on the radio at 7.15am.

He proposed rolling out a rehousing scheme that has been piloted in Redbridge in London to other parts of the country. It’s designed to help older homeowners live in smaller, better adapted homes, without giving up their financial asset.

Underoccupation has had a bit of a dodgy couple of months. A shock defeat in the Lords means that the Welfare Reform Bill might be changed so that working age households aren’t penalised for having a spare room.

The argument put forward was that there simply isn’t enough other suitable accommodation for people to move in to, so penalising people was essentially a bedroom tax.

But it is also a huge problem for older people. There are many who are rattling around in unsuitably large houses with stairs and ancient bathrooms that just aren’t fit for an elderly resident.

Kicking perfectly active, erudite, engaged people out of their own homes would be tantamount to elder abuse, not to mention being a bit of a vote-quasher.

So there might just be something in Redbridge’s Freespace scheme. It helps find older people a new home, helps with moving costs, and then looks after the original property in order to rent it out to a family in need of a bit more space. The rental income goes back into the older person’s estate, helping pay for care costs and the home reverts to their family after their death.

It sounds like a win-win situation.

But a closer look at the details of the pilot scheme reveals Redbridge Council hasn’t found it all plain sailing. In a report from the council, it admits that cases in the pilot to date have been ‘varied’.

One elderly woman moved from a 4-5 bedroom house to a standard sheltered unit, and found that she would be worse off financially because of rules surrounding pension credit. There’s also no guarantee that this would work in different cities, or rural areas.

Rather than encourage older, and in some cases vulnerable people, out of their homes, surely the answer is to build more family homes in the first place. Oh…we’ve been here before, haven’t we?