Where do I start?
1) Why are you called the Intergenerational Foundation when your stated purpose is (I quote your report) to promote the rights of younger and future generations in British policy-¬making. Intergenerational means co-operation between generations. Your report does not discuss ‘under-occupation’ by younger groups, or how space in houses is used in properties ‘underoccupied’ by households of all ages. It blames the older generation for everything.
2) How do you define a bedroom? I have found no definition of a bedroom anywhere in your report. I will explain: a bungalow/flat is described as having 4 rooms. How many of these are bedrooms? A new-build, 4 bedroomed house I saw on sale recently had three rooms described as bedrooms on the first floor, but of the two rooms on the top floor one was described as a bedroom, the other as a study. Would your survey describe this as a bedroom or living room? Then there are houses with 3 or more rooms on the ground floor, sometimes these are bedrooms, sometimes they are not. How do you define a bedroom?
3) How did you define an unoccupied bedroom? Did you include intermittent use of bedrooms as occupation or non-occupation? Many families are widely dispersed and older people will want to have children and grandchildren living and sleeping in the family home when they visit – and at times these visits may be both frequent and/or prolonged. Grandchildren living near grandparents may sleep-over, or a bedroom may be a day nursery if a grandparent is providing childcare. Again a crucial lack of definitions in the report
4) Did you at any time analyse how people, old and young, use the rooms in their houses? Have you ever looked at Rightmove or any housing programme on television and seen how often home-owners of all ages use rooms all over the house for other purposes than just ‘living’ or sleeping? Rooms that could be defined as bedrooms are used as gyms, studies, hobby rooms, offices and storage rooms, Are you suggesting that households should have the size of house they can occupy dictated to them by household size? Are we only permitted to have designated and used bedrooms plus living and eating space. Did you take into account alternative uses of rooms?
5) You say: ‘The lifecycle of housing is breaking down partly due to the behaviour of older groups: rather than downsizing, more and more older people are staying on in the family home and hoarding housing wealth’. Down-sizing is a very recent phenomena. In the past a house was bought at marriage and lived in until the purchasers died. The elderly lady in a large house she could not afford to maintain could be found on every street 40 years ago. This is very rare now.
6) How far is the pressure on housing caused by the decisions by younger people to move out of their parents home before they marry, which was not common in the past. Likewise how far has marital breakdown put a pressure on demand for family sized homes?
7) The report constantly seem surprised that it is mainly older people who own their homes outright. Has it occurred to you that the vast majority of people, now and in the past, needed large mortgages to buy a home. Generally these are 25 years long so very few people are likely to own a property outright before they are 50. Since most people start by buying a small property and at some point sell it and buy a bigger property it is not really that surprising that older people own bigger houses, nor that they do not own their property outright until close to retirement age.
8) How would it help first time buyers if downsizers with substantial cash assets and no need for a mortgage were to be competing with them to buy smaller properties? Not every older person wants or needs to live in sheltered accommodation.
9) As an economist, who for some years specialised in the housing market. I would be ashamed if I had produced a report so partial, so biased and so poorly researched. It is what I would call a journalist report, not one I would expect any academically respectable foundation to be producing.
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