Amid the current blizzard of news, both foreign and domestic, some of Britain’s most chronic problems risk getting buried under the avalanche. And, away from the noisy headlines, one new study this week was quietly damning about our nation’s growing housing crisis.
A YouGov poll for the National Housing Federation found that the number of people over the age of 55 renting privately has rocketed by more than 70 per cent in the past decade, growing at three and a half times the rate of the population. There are now 866,870 private renting households occupied by the over-55s in England. New data this summer forecast that the number of pensioners forced to rent privately will soar to a million by 2033.
While many assume that “Generation Rent” is made up of young people who simply can’t get on the housing ladder, the figures suggest that we now have an “Older Generation Rent” who can’t afford a mortgage or who simply can’t find council or social housing.
While many older people do own their homes, a growing number do not – and the plight of the “retired renter” is getting worse. Among the most arresting statistics this week were that two in five older private renters struggle to afford heating, food or clothes.
Ask any young person and they’ll tell you that the twin difficulty with private renting is that it is both expensive and insecure. If you’re on a fixed income like a pensioner, the cost is even more worrying. And, in your older age, the very idea of constantly being moved on is another anxiety.
Nearly a quarter (23 per cent) of older private renters have been asked to leave their current or previous home. Yet only this month the Government confirmed it was delaying indefinitely Michael Gove’s plans to ban “no-fault” evictions.
Nearly half of private renting pensioners over the age of 65 are in the lowest income bracket in England (the bottom fifth) – meaning they live on just £11,341 a year on average after tax. They are twice as likely to be in the bottom income bracket as renters under 65.
One shocking report by the charity Age UK found older tenants are so frightened of eviction that they dare not complain about the appalling state of disrepair of their rented flats, including the lack of decent heating or of adaptations such as ramps or walk-in showers.
“Baby boomers” are often assumed by many to have been smugly shielded from the worst effects of the housing crisis. But the findings show that many have fallen through the cracks in our broken system.
Caroline Abrahams, charity director of Age UK, tells me: “It is not just Generation Rent who are suffering from the housing crisis – there are also many older private renters most of which live on a small, fixed income.
“We have heard some shocking stories via our advice line about older people living on their own for weeks or months with no proper heating, cooking facilities or hot water and too scared to ask their landlord to fix anything. Highly vulnerable older people are enduring grim living conditions in the private rented sector, and this is truly shocking.”
Of course, the main reason for this surge in numbers is the dire shortage of council or housing association homes, in the past often a lifeline for older people who rely on affordable rents.
And another bit of bad news buried this week was the stark fact that the Government had yet again failed to meet the Tory manifesto target to build 300,000 new homes a year, with just 234,397 net additional dwellings in England in 2022/23, a similar figure to the previous year.
There was a glimmer of good news as the latest “affordable housing supply” figures showed the biggest increase in social rent housebuilding starts and completions since the early 2010s.
But the Cameron coalition government cut affordable homes funding by a massive two thirds and the latest figure was only a slight uptick of 1,941 social rented homes, providing only a tenth of what is needed to meet demand.
Shadow Housing Minister Matthew Pennycook tells me: “The Tories have presided over an average net loss of more than 14,000 social homes a year since 2010.”
The Department for Levelling Up, Housing and Communities insists it is “on track” to meet the Tory manifesto commitments, but it seems that for Rishi Sunak the housing crisis isn’t a crisis at all.
In his recent reshuffle, Sunak changed the housing minister yet again, installing Lee Rowley as the 16th occupant of that important job in the past 13 years – truly an extraordinary statistic in itself. More broadly, housing was not among any of Sunak’s “five pledges” for 2023, nor among his new “five long-term decisions” for the economy just a couple of weeks ago.
Affordable housing is of course key to the health of our economy, but for older people it’s also about something much more fundamental: a sense of dignity, stability and security in your later years.
Pensioners are at least getting an enhanced winter fuel allowance, bolstered by a “Cost Of Living Payment”, this year. And the “triple lock” pension rise will help many.
Although Pension Credit helps the poorest, in 2021/22 there were 800,000 older households entitled to this enhanced benefit but not receiving it – put off by the “means test” claiming it entails. A third of older people whose incomes are so low that they qualify for Pension Credit are failing to receive it.
But the sheer lack of council housing or housing association housing means that every year we are seeing more pensioners forced into the clutches of private landlords.
Alistair Darling, whose death was rightly mourned across the political divide yesterday [today], spotted the two real solutions.
One was to reshape pensions and savings incentives to allow more young people to plan for higher housing costs in older age. Only this spring he launched an Institute for Fiscal Studies review, pointing out the increasing numbers of people who will be renting all their working lives – and then in retirement too.
The other was to pump more money into build more homes, something Darling did as Chancellor. In April he warned: “As long as we have a chronic shortage of housing, particularly housing for rent as well as for buy, this problem is going to be exacerbated – which is why the Government needs to deal with it and deal with it soon”.
The growing phenomenon of “retired renters” is a ticking time bomb facing us all. And the housing shortage is a reminder that the young are the old of tomorrow, and there’s more that unites the different generations than divides them.
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