Minister should stop prattling about ‘rattling around’
F you’re not yet 60, if you eat your greens and take long walks, one day, with any luck, you might be!
If you are over 60 and own a semi-detached house, according to housing minister Chris Pincher, you’re ‘rattling around in it’ and should sell up and move into a onebedroom property, because you’re a ‘barrier’ preventing a young family moving into the home you worked all your life to pay for.
I bet when you sometimes struggled to pay the monthly mortgage and the mortgage protection premiums, you never imagined a government minister would, with cold indifference, refer to you not as a hardworking, diligent citizen, but a ‘barrier’.
The following are his words – not mine: “The challenge is that in the early 1990s, something like 31% of properties were under-occupied: They were too big for the numbers of people rattling around inside them. And now that percentage is 38%. So, it’s a very significant number of properties where we see under-occupation I think there is an opportunity to encourage downsizing; to encourage the growth of the later living sector in order to free up homes in the middle of the market.”
The later living sector are small properties specifically for older people that he’s encouraging developers to build more of.
Let’s be honest. Not all older people want to be surrounded by other old people or live somewhere that’s a third of the size of their previous home.
I don’t know what’s more ridiculous: that ‘Penny’ Pincher has no idea what goes on outside the Westminster Bubble; or that his full title is ‘Minister of Housing, Communities and Levelling Up’!
Presumably when he was made a minister, along with his portfolio he was handed a spirit level.
In the real world, many three-bedroom semis only have two decentsized bedrooms plus a tiny box room.
Hardly a vast mansion to ‘rattle around in’.
As he is also Communities Minister, ‘Penny’ Pincher should know that more than 100,000 marriages break down every year, forcing many sons and daughters to move back into the parental home, often bringing their own children with them.
If their parents have downsized to a one-bedroom flat, I’d be interested to know how ‘Penny’ Pincher plans to solve the potentially huge problem of where their children and grandchildren can seek alternative refuge after a marriage breakdown. I’m going to keep my eye on Mr Pincher.
I think we all should.