More emotional support could help the elderly to downsize
ELDERLY people should be given “emotional” support to encourage them to move to smaller homes and make way for younger families, according to the Royal Institution of Chartered Surveyors.
The institution said that more needed to be done to deal with pensioners’ “distress” at moving house and suggested that councils work together to arrange “accompanied visits” to “create a more positive experience”.
It also suggested that the Government pays for a new fund to cover the moving costs of pensioners. The report found that nearly a third of people aged 55 or over have considered downsizing in the last five years, but only seven per cent of them have actually made the move.
It said: “Knowing one’s neighbours and feeling a sense of community is also an important factor in deciding to move homes for some older people.”
Jeremy Blackburn, one of the authors of the report, told The Daily Telegraph: “One of the things we heard was about the number of pensioners living in under-occupied property, who might be asset-rich in terms of the property itself, but are actually quite poor overall in terms of their savings.” Mr Blackburn was reluctant to provide a figure for how much elderly people should be offered to help with moving costs, but suggested the figure would be “more in the hundreds than the thousands.”
Lord Newby, a Liberal Democrat former minister, said that more than half of people aged over 55 had spare rooms.
“I think for many older people, they want to downsize and it’s really hard to do it, so anything that makes it easier must be a good thing,” he said.
“There’s a lot of hysteria about forcing people to downsize, but this is just ridiculous, because nobody is forcing anyone to do anything. It’s just helping people who want to do something.”
Meanwhile, the Government was accused by MPs of “short-sighted mismanagement” for failing to collect “basic” information on how many homes had been built on public land which had been sold for house-building.
Meg Hillier, the Labour chairman of the public accounts committee, said it was an “insult to taxpayers” that the Department for Communities and Local Government had no idea how many homes had been built or how much profit had been raised by sales.