‘It is my life, there is no way I’d leave my house’
SITTING IN his armchair with dog Spot at his side, 79-year-old Reg Scaife tells about the only home he’s ever known.
The stone farmhouse near Hampsthwaite in North Yorkshire dates back to the turn of the 20th century and was his parents’ home before he was born. In their later years, it was where he cared for them without recourse to social services.
The former bus driver and farmer has not had a holiday from the house since his school days and after nearly eight decades there cannot even imagine leaving.
But after a nasty fall last summer led to him needing a lengthy operation to replace his damaged hip, Mr Scaife’s deteriorating health and difficulty in getting about meant his future at the property was looking ever more uncertain.
For him, the prospect of moving is unimaginable. “It is my life, there is no way I would leave,” he said. “I don’t mind struggling, being independent makes a big difference.”
The turning point came with the arrival of Poppy ChartersHess, from North Yorkshire County Council’s Living Well scheme, a project designed to maintain the independence of adults and reduce the need for social care support.
After turning up in February as part of a 12-week support programme, Mrs ChartersHess was immediately struck by the freezing temperature of -4C inside the house, where Mr Scaife sat huddled and stiff.
Though he had installed electricity in the house years ago, it had no central heating and a log burner that didn’t work properly. Typically stubborn, Mr Scaife just put on an extra jumper, but the cold was hindering his recovery from his operation.
With the help of Living Well, six months later things are looking more positive. An environmental health assessment by Harrogate council led to full central heating and a replacement burner being installed, and the transformation of his bathroom into a more accessible ‘wet room’ will improve things even further.
With family member Margaret, a regular visitor at his home, and 12-year-old Jack Russell, Spot, for company, Mr Scaife talks happily about the upcoming Irish music concert he is organising, something he has done for the last 25 years for charity.
“He didn’t think he deserved it, but he deserves to live in a habitable home,” says Mrs Charters-Hess. “He is an example of someone who has given back to the community.”
The desire for people to remain independent in old age, in a home of their own rather than being forced to go into care, was the focus for dozens of industry professionals when they gathered in Harrogate for the Rural Housing for an Ageing Population conference, organised by the Northern Housing Consortium.
And according to Lord Richard Best, a peer who lives just a few minutes away near Tadcaster, policy-makers at local and national level have yet to catch up with the enormous challenges caused by the way the country’s population has aged.
Getting Whitehall mandarins to understand more than what is going on in London is hard enough, he told the audience, with central government’s grasp of rural issues being worse still.
Describing the problem, the 73-year-old said: “There is another 20 years of life that when I was born you didn’t need to worry about. A family home, a three bedroom home with a garden is what we thought we needed. But we now have these 20 extra years in which a family home is not necessarily the best option for you.”
By ‘right-sizing’, the preferred industry term instead of ‘downsizing’, Lord Best says older people can avoid being tipped out into residential care before it is absolutely necessary.
But particularly in rural areas, he fears there is a lack of suitable accommodation which will properly provide for their needs, with government policy and the commercial incentives of housebuilders meaning three-bedroom family homes dominate.
Though Sajid Javid pledged to build 300,000 homes a year while Housing Secretary, the peer questions how many of these will be for older people.
Citing a recent Demos report that 30,000 homes a year are needed for older people to ‘rightsize’ to, currently only 7,000 such homes are being built annually, meaning we are “miles behind”.
“We are just not getting these homes built,” said Lord Best. “There is no way we are going to get the major housebuilders interested in this. They make their money making the same old family houses, and now a lot smaller as the space standards have declined.”