Intergenerational Foundation webchat with Co-founder Angus Hanton on 9 April

I have been wondering who funds this Intergenerational Foundation, who works for it, has any body commissioned its reports and does anyone take any serious notice of its findings?

I would research it myself but am very busy cleaning a myriad of bedrooms before the next two generations descend. So if anyone else is inclined to do so it would be interesting.

In the meantime it also got me thinking that I have never had a gap year. Straight from school to college to work, filling in those long summer holidays with temporary jobs. It is also worth noting that there are several billionaires in this country who pay less tax than me and I am a pensioner on just above the tax threshold. We also paid a mortgage rate of 15% when purchasing our very small house in London into which were crammed six people.

In fact, that is all SO NOT FAIR that I may well lie on the floor, kick and scream and throw myself around in a terrible two tantrum.

I am in council properties and downsized long before this debate came along. I moved out of a 5 bedroomed house into a 2 bedroom flat when my health got worse and I had just one son at home. I now find myself under occupied as my son moved out 18 months ago. Ridiculous, I feel like I did my bit and am now in a secure groundfloor flat which I need due to health problems. The bedroom inquestion id used by my family, children and grandchilden that visit and stay with me if I am iull. I feel that this shortens the time spent in hospital and so I am not too much of a drain on the health service.
Do they now want me isolated and having to be in hospial or home care when ill?.
The other problem is there are no 1 bedroom properties in the area I live so I have to pay the bedroom tax, (lets not pretend its anything else)for the priveledge of having 'downsized' before asked and am unable to find a suitable 1 bed property.

Bravo Elegran

What about the debt that society owes to us? To those who gave up their own careers while their children were growing up so as to give them their time and care at home? To those who campaigned so that women could get equal pay, who established child care, fought for equal opportunities at work and against domestic violence at home?

If you are a baby-boomer,Angus then you were born just after the war, and you are about 60 to 68. Chances are that your teenage children must have been born when you about 50 -55.

Most (well, many) of the posters on Gransnet had their children when they were younger than that, before the women had established much of a career, and it was difficult for them then to get back into full-time work. Childcare was not easy, shopping was not a one-stop supermarket trip, there was only one car per household (if that) and holidays with children were usually spent with one or other set of grandparents.

We had mortgages to pay, just as young parents do now, or we paid rent without the prospect of one day in the far future actually owning a house outright. We had to provide a deposit before we got that mortgage - which was only calculated on the income of one main breadwinner.

Everything except the house mortgage and the car were paid for as we could afford it. We tightened our belts, furnished our houses piecemeal, and did our own wallpapering. Our clothes lasted for years and we handed down children's clothes to family and friends.

Our reward was to own a home that we loved, where we brought up our children, who now come back to that home with their own children. If we have savings, we help out our family, and in any case our "spare rooms" are often full of grandchildren.

There are many grandparents who care for grandchildren regularly, from a day or two a week to daily childcare and frequent sleepovers. Worse than unpaid, in fact at a loss. Many more volunteer at a charity (not just at a shop, there are hands-on organisations who depend heavily on retired helpers) or look out for their frailer neighbours.

We spend our savings and contribute to the economy. We vote, contributing to the political life of the country.

What we contribute more than balances any imagined "debt" on the rest of society. There are many greedier sectors of the economy to be targetted before us.

On the website for Intergeneratioal Foundation, he says he is a babyboomer with teenage children.
He'll get his comeuppance. Soon.

Others on here have expressed very clearly what causes the real failures in the housing market and exposed the many weaknesses in your arguments.
I would simply like to ask why you chose to express those arguments in the rhetoric of inter-generational conflict and blame? What did you hope to achieve by that?

The other reason I will not be taking part on the 9 April is I do not want to give a shoddy report any kind of credibility by taking it seriously.

The reasons we have a shortage of affordable suitable housing is far more to do with lack of house building, particularly in the public rented sector, and burgeoning number of households. The reason for this is multiple, young people expecting to leave home and establish their own households while single, partnership breakdown, immigration and more older people surviving to greater ages and living independently without any need for care.

The reason so many houses are so small, the smallest in Europe is because of government insistence on high density house building, the growth of the buy to let sector, which prefers 1 or 2 bedroomed flats and it suits the developers, the more battery hen cages they build the greater their profits.

Our local council is now unable to turn down developers wanting planning permission because it failed to meet the targets set by government. Why did it not meet the targets? Not NIMBYism or failure to allocate land for housing, but because during the economic downturn, developers stopped building on estates they had started because they couldn't sell properties because potential buyers couldn't get mortgages.

To reduce the housing problem down to older people not downsizing, is ludicrous.

How can you have fairness between the generations? Many members would say that is is not fair that they did not have the opportunity to get a decent secondary or tertiary education when they were young. Grammar schools and universities were for the elite - and fewer women than men were able to benefit from them. They might also say it is not fair that they were having to work hard from the age of 16, while their grandchildren appear to be living the hedonistic life of a student well into their 20s (or 30s) and have all kind of career opportunities that they would never have dreamed of. Have you ever looked at a book on Careers for Girls published in the 1960s?
I could go on. Fairness is always an illusion.
We are building fewer houses now per annum than at any point since the 1920s. according to the Economist this week (no link due to paywall - published online 24/3). Developers sit on land banks which increase in value with no effort. Limiting the supply of new properties also suits the developers very nicely as it keeps prices high. The Economist article says that if food had increased in price as fast as housing in the years since 1971 then a loaf would cost £51. This is the effect of supply outstripping demand.
I think that in focussing your attention on the inconsiderate older people who under-occupy their family homes you are barking up the wrong tree.
I have downsized you will be pleased to know. We are renting a flat and have let out our five-bedroomed house (to an Australian family - but even seconded civil servants need somewhere to live I guess). It was a massive project to get rid of most of my possessions, sort through old papers and make this happen. Over £1000 of donations to Oxfam alone. It was emotionally difficult and stressful. But there were two of us on the case. I can understand exactly why people in their 70s and 80s (possibly widowed or in poor health) are not in any way able to tackle such an endeavour on their own.

rosequartz, me too.

They won't take any notice of course. And I will not be joining in on 9th April as my bedrooms will all be filled - with family!

Yes. Rose. I find MiceElf doing that sometimes! But your points were pertinent.

When I re-read my post I wonder why I am trying to justify my actions to this group of people who spout dangerous and insidious propaganda intended to cause dissent between the generations.

Brilliant post Flickety B

Very well put indeed, FlicketyB.

One of our downstairs rooms was labelled 'study' when we first bought our house. We had moved from the London area to a cheaper area because of work, and probably could have dispensed with having a mortgage but carried on with one because we needed the extra room to accommodate an elderly, not very mobile, parent downstairs. Another reason to buy the larger house was in case we should ever need to move back to the London area, we could repurchase another very small house there. We ended up having a mortgage for 35 years.

The downstairs room has since had a change of use to study. DH does a lot of voluntary work and the shelves are packed with files etc to do with this. I suppose if we downsize he could give up his voluntary work. However, retired people are the backbone of voluntary charity work in this country, so this would be a pity.

One bedroom contains a cot and single bed for GC who may stay, or need a nap when we look after them when the younger generation are working.
Yet another bedroom is a storeroom for all the belongings of one of this younger generation who is not yet settled. I suppose she could pay a goodly sum for a lockup instead.

When we mention the 'd' word to our DC they say "oh, but why, this is where we grew up, we love to come home to stay". And it is their inheritance unless extortionate nursing home fees eat it all away. Why not concentrate your efforts, Mr Hanton, on looking at why residential and nursing care costs such huge amounts of money that eats into the inheritance of future generations?

Our first home was small, our second even smaller. This is our third home and the one we like the best. It suits us, it suits our family when they visit and quite honestly it is no business of anybody's whether I have no spare bedrooms or six as long as I pay my bills.

It is time more good housing was built and people were left to enjoy the fruits of their labours without pressure from groups such as the Intergenerational Foundation.

Thank you for not holding back, FlicketyB

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.

Also, those of us that live near to our children need space to look after our grandchildren so their parents can work and those that live a long way from them [result of the get on yer bike era] need space for them to come and stay sometimes. And people can always move into our huge houses when we're gone. No one seems to complain about all the buy to let house owners, even though they're a result of governments selling off and not replacing council houses.

If any members of the younger generation wish to come along and pay me the full asking price for my house plus, because I have no particular desire to move, something towards my stamp duty and removal expenses, then I would possibly consider downsizing. I would consider downsizing to a smaller home, preferably a bungalow. It would have to be large enough to accommodate my family when they come to stay from overseas, large enough for looking after GC on a weekly basis without disrupting every room and large enough for DH and me and our day to day needs. With a large enough garden as DH says this is what keeps him fit. Oh, and in an area as convenient as the one we live in at present. Unfortunately there are very few bungalows in our area and not likely any to be built. And if there should happen to be one which would meet our specifications we could probably not afford it for the price we would get for our house.

Did we put such constant pressure and lay such guilt on our parents? I don't believe we did.

Mr Hanton you seem to have a particular beef about us oldies living in our many-bedroomed houses ...... so, if we downsize en-masse, will the younger generations be in any better position to buy our properties, or will they still be hampered by zero-contract hours, overseas buyers inflating the property market, shortage of social housing, etc?

I would love to downsize but, given how social care seems to be reducing not increasing means that I prefer to stay living next to good, helpful neighbours. Also buying/selling homes is a pretty awful experience in this country and I'm not sure I want to put myself through it. The number of people I know that have had a buyer pull out at the very last minute is frightening [usually trying to bring the price down even more]. Another thing that bothers me is the way that, when new housing developments are built, any further services required eg doctors surgeries/schools etc are not buoilt until the whole development is complete; how does that make any sense?? There are some nice little retirement bungalows in the village next to me and the majority of them are empty; I think the main reason is that they have a communal garden and most people I've spoken to said they would prefer a small, private garden of their own..just because you're getting older doesn't mean you don't want to own a dog or a cat. And [not really to do with this but I need to let off steam] our village had a complex built with flats and bungalows for the elderly. The doctors surgery that was a few yards from the development is closing down [thans NHS England et al] and there is talk of the village Post Office closing as well; we've all been told to 'get on the bus to the local town'. Why do planners not think ahead or even put themselves in the position of the people they deal with? Also, due to divorce I only have a small pension and hope that, if I ever need to move into a care home my pension plus renting out my house would cover the costs involved. I used to feel very comfortable with the thought of growing old in this country but, alas, it now terrifies me.