Oldies like me would downsize, if the properties were better

Twenty-six years ago, I moved with my wife Lindy and our four young children into one wing of a large country house in North Yorkshire. At the time, it was perfect for our needs: plenty of space for the brood to run around, a large garden, and stabling for horses – a particular family passion.

Now Lindy and I find ourselves rattling around, save for the weekends when our offspring and their children come to visit. We still love the house, but our kitchen is getting older, the internet doesn’t work well, and the place costs a fortune to heat and maintain.

For years now, we have talked about downsizing. Recently, we have even taken to poring over property websites. Yet no matter how many charming cottages and purpose-built retirement homes we swipe through, we have yet to take the plunge.

The truth is, that, like many people our age (I am 70), we are really waiting for the crisis. One of these days, one of us will fall and break a bone or have a minor stroke, go into hospital, and come out very shaky, and we’ll look at our home in a new light, realising that perhaps it’s time to sell up. But, until that happens, like many older people in the UK, we won’t turn our minds to the future.

Why is this? In America and continental Europe, older people seem happy to sell up and move on. Collected your pension pay cheque? Time to move to Florida. Children moved out? Set up home in an ultra-modernist retirement pad. In Britain, meanwhile, our offspring suffer because we pensioners now control more than 44 per cent of housing wealth and hog all the family homes.

The problem is that, for us, what’s on offer simply isn’t that attractive. The beautiful little house on the edge of the village close to the shop and the pub is an elusive dream. Instead, we are presented with generic, often poky properties with flimsy walls. We want to move somewhere smaller and more manageable, but that does not mean we’ll put up with substandard homes. We want attractive places to live as much as the next person – preferably with decent-sized windows and plenty of light, as we don’t see as well as we once did. We need to be able to live there well into old age, so walk-in showers with grab-rails are good, but only if they look like something you’d find in a luxury hotel.

And although that beautiful little house may not exist, there is a lot to be said for moving from the village to a market town, where you can walk to everything you need. Housebuilders need to realise there’s a great opportunity here: we are people who, once we have sold our family homes, don’t need a mortgage, thanks to massive increases in property prices over the past 30 years. Offer us something to whet our appetites and shopping around starts to become fun, rather than depressing.

Of course there’s a financial element, too. Last year, the all-party parliamentary group on housing and care for older people that I chair commissioned a report by the think tank Demos. It recommended three things: remove stamp duty for downsizers buying for under £250,000; allow downsizers with less valuable homes to access help-to-buy deals; and provide financial advice to help people work through the options.

I want to be able to make the decision to move before I’m forced into it. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have to start perusing Rightmove again.