I sorry, jack, but I don’t quite share your interpretation. I know it is a Daily Mail article but I imagine the quotes are fairly accurate. Among MS Blackwell’s ramblings:
“Ministers should look at ways to tackle the problem of retired people living in properties that are too big for them,…”
For whom is private home ownership a problem? Whoever it is they might just have to put up with it.
“…they may need to be steered towards moving to retirement housing.”
When it is suggested that social housing tenants are “steered” away from Central London properties to Birmingham or Northampton because of the costs involved in their supported housing there is absolute uproar. Accusations of ghettoization and social cleansing immediately surface. However, suggest that older people might be “steered” from the homes they own to elsewhere and that is perfectly sound.
“….Britain had a ‘real issue with the last-time buyer”
What? She means the people who have bought and paid for their house (whatever its size) and might just want to remain there in their retirement are “a big issue”.
“There’s older borrowers who basically pay off their mortgage and sit quite happily in a very big house.”
How DARE they!!!
CML chairman Moray McDonald said that, last year, just one per cent of the UK’s 5million homeowners over-65 moved house. That doesn’t really look terribly healthy,’ he said. ‘It literally means those homes are not released for families or indeed for redevelopment for the kinds of housing those older people would like to live in.'
It may have escaped his notice that most of the older people to whom he refers are already resident in the kinds of housing they would like to live in. That’s why they bought them and remain there. None that I know of are "stuck" in their houses. They live in them because they choose to and those that want to move do so. They do not need any facilitation or "encouragement".
‘It also massively blocks the passing of family capital to younger generations, which we know would enable more people to buy sooner. So it bears on younger borrowers massively.’
Oh dear. How sad. Never mind.
Successive governments have presided over massive increases in population fuelled by immigration and the benefits system failing to discourage higher birth rates. Now it is the older population’s fault. The Council of Mortgage Lenders should concentrate on providing mortgages. Social gerrymandering is not in their brief. The government can spend taxpayers' dosh building shoeboxes.