to think it cant carry on young families living in cramped flats while protected pensioners rattle around in 5 bed houses

[generationrentsucks]

I just think with the Tories in now, nothing will change with housing, they will keep prices high by carrying on with these help to buy that just allow sub prime loans.

Also I think hardly anyone actually ever downsizes, everyone says they do but not many can actually bring themselves to do it.

If it is a HA or council owned home and under occupied then it's fair enough to ask them to downsize provided a nice home can be provided (unlikely).

If the pensioner (or anyone else) own their home it's no one else's business.

Couples should think carefully about having children if they can't afford to house them decently. People buying their own home often have to forgo the desired third child because of financial constraints, so why should other couples have additional children they can't afford to house decently?

Blaming pensioners is ridiculous and they are just an easy target. The responsibility lies with the governments lack of resolve in building more houses, ridiculous renting laws, poor economy, encouraging buy to let mortgages which disadvantages first time buyers, and on and on. Basically successive government policies.

But let's pick on rich pensioners (of which there are relatively few!)

I sacrificed children earlier in my 20s so that I could get on the ladder.

More absurd language.

Doesn't sound quite so righteous to say 'delayed having' though.

Sacrificed, indeed. Pah.

when you link us to some statistics that show how many pensioners live alone in council or HA owned properties with 5 bedrooms, then we could discuss it....
until then......adios

Oh. A baby boomer bashing thread. It's been almost a week so we were due one.

Some people my age do not have huge houses to rattle round in. Some are living almost in poverty and in rented accommodation.

Not all young people cannot afford to buy their own houses. My DS has and so have most of his friends.

We (DH and I) did things in a specific order because we thought ahead to what we wanted and where we wanted to be. We were lucky that our plans worked out.

First priority was to save for a deposit on a house so after university we both went back to live with our parents in order to save as much as we could. Then we bought a house(wreck) which we spent six months doing up before we got married and moved in.

Then we started to save as much as we could because we wanted a family, and wanted the buffer of savings behind us. Then we had 2 DCs and stopped there because we felt we could not afford any more without depriving the two we already had of what we wanted for them.

The OP makes it all sound very simple but it isn't.

The young people I know are on their 2nd or 3rd internships /working zero hours/going for interviews for a contract that will last 2 months.

The retired people I know are still helping out their kids one way or other and expect to be doing so for some time.

There's some depressing nonsense on all sides here. The 1% must be laughing their heads off.

Have you Dixie? That's good if it's getting back to normal in that respect. My friend was told she needed a 20% deposit and on a £200K property it's impossible for her to save that amount. This was last year though. What bank are you with? I know she has enough deposit to saved to cover 5%.

20% deposit - sheesh. I'm gonna have to sell my house once it's paid off in order for my dcs to get on the ladder, aren't I?!

I can't find any stats Duncan Quagmire, but it's commonly held that pensioners are a bigger group of under-occupiers than the working age group who're already subject to the loss of the spare room subsidy- and there are 600,000 of them.

Under-occupancy is a massive deal. It's a shame the Tories decided to tackle it in the way they did, but we're in the midst of an affordable housing shortage and something did need to be done.

Jack I seriously doubt that there are many pensioners living alone in 5 bed council HA properties. IF any.

The majority of wealth and savings in this country is with the over 55's so it's not surprising they have the bigger houses.
My experience is that my dad and his friends only downsized from their 3-4 bed houses in their 90's to go into sheltered accommodation.

My friends and I have parents in their 80's and above and it is likely DH and I will inherit when we are about to retire ourselves and DD is at university!

Builders want to build titchy houses to get as many sales as possible per square metre. So there is no incentive to build decent sized family homes - and in the SE most decent 3/4/5 bed homes with gardens get knocked down to build flats.

We need a minimum standard and size for houses
We need a requirement for builders to build family homes rather than flats
We need to stop knocking down family homes to build flats.

Can't see a Tory government ever doing any of these though.

Councils and housing associations need to build more one and two bed properties

Agreed, though they don't need to build them, just renovate the many thousands of empty houses across the country and develop brown field sites, eg empty offices.

And I agree there should be incentives for single people in large houses to move to smaller properties, if only because it's also better for them as they get older - it's much easier to have a small 2 bed bungalow or flat to look after in your 80s, than a 4 bed house with a large garden. Maybe we need more smaller bungalows to be built as well - I wouldn't want to move to a flat after living in a detached house unless it was VERY well sound-proofed.

I think if I lived in a huge house, and my children were grown up, I would probably downsize as I couldn't really leave the house to just one of them, and they wouldn't all want to share it.

So I'd either specify it be sold on my death or I'd sell it during my lifetime, downsize, and give the kids the spare money to get them started off.

My parents downsized but ironically the tiny ugly bungalow they bought cost the same as the three bedroom house they sold.

Bizarre.

I think the OP is referring to council housing though? In which case, there is probably a good case for transferring a single tenant to a smaller property when one becomes available, and freeing up the council property for a large family.

I think if you are a council tenant then it's just par for the course perhaps...you get the use of the property when you need it, then when you don't, you get a smaller one.

I have seen a lot of family homes go up where we live the only problem is the price! 3 bedroom homes on a development near me start at £800k, ordinary families can't afford that. I've noticed that new homes seem to be really high spec and swanky and command a high price. I would be happy to see some basic shoeboxes come on the market like we had in the 1980s if they were a decent price.

I found this Duncan. It doesn't specifically state that they're social housing properties, but yes- there are pensioners claiming HB for up to six spare bedrooms.

When we sold our flat, lots of downsizers viewed it (and a downsizing couple bought it).

But although they all wanted to have fewer rooms to "rattle around in", lots of them hadn't appreciated that they would also have smaller rooms, in proportion to the expected number of occupants - smaller kitchen, smaller front room, smaller/no garden.

The nicer Homes have the pleasant benefits of a big house - high ceilings, big mature garden, wide hallways - without any one person having the responsibility of maintaining or filling all of it.

FWIW our buyers moved from a "half a Georgian house" flat to our 4yo building, delighted not to be heating two extra feet at the top of each room any more. Very practical people.

I think that's a fair point.
People now seem to want en suites, utility rooms, downstairs wc....even in tiny 2 bed starter homes!
But the sell off of social housing is the big problem here.
On my mums road there are many ex council houses now owned by btl landlords. They paid prob about £20-30k for the house and then charge £600 pm rent for a few years then sell at £100-110k

Just wanted to say after reading some comments, I work in local government and we've been told that where pensioners have sold their houses and spent/given away the money it can be seen as deprivation of assets. When they're assessed for social care/care fees they could be treated as if they still have the assets, even if they sold/gave them away years ago, and be refused financial help towards care fees.
I believe this is also true if you blow your pension 'on a Lamborghini', although strangely this wasn't mentioned publicly before the election - I wonder why?!
Although there is the argument that councils won't just leave vulnerable old people to die if they've spent all their money, no they won't. But they might go after your son/daughter's house if that's where the money went.
Independent financial advice is essential!

I don't know any pensioners in a 5 bed house.

My parents own a 3 bed house but my Dad worked hard to pay off his mortgage and raise his kids (on a very low wage). Even though they're pensioners, they pay a property tax for the privilege of owning their own home. Why should they hand it over to some random family?

MIL and FIL own a 4 bed house. They actually upsized when they retired but their new house was cheaper than the old one as it was in a less desirable area. They like having extra bedrooms for when their DC and DGC come to stay.

Even if my parents and in-laws wanted to downsize, there are no flats or bungalows where they live. It's all houses.

If the OP is referring to pensioners living in council houses, then I very much doubt that any council has significant numbers of 5 bed houses.

There are any number of things your government (and mine) could do to make things easier for people to rent or buy their own homes. Lots of posters have outlined those things already. Targeting pensioners isn't the answer.

But they might go after your son/daughter's house if that's where the money went

Deprivation of assets is an interesting one.

At what point is one no longer allowed to do what one wants with ones own money? Nobody has a crystal ball to forsee their age of care need and then work back, say, 15 years to be outside an arbitrary time frame and spend, spend, spend while it's still allowed.

The answer then, surely, is to have zero state provision, with those who can living a life of self-imposed austerity while squirrelling away thousands for the inevitable, and those who can't, well, tough shit.

I think social housing policy is more to blame for housing shortage than pensioners in houses they own. In our local authority, 40% of new build in developments of more than 3 houses have to be social housing.
If a developer buys five plots, two will have to be social housing. The developer will get some money for these, but the payment tends to cover build cost but not land cost, so the cost of the two social house plots is passed on to three remaining private homes.
Other builders will sit on the land instead.
My brother has been stopped from building a house in my dad's own garden because me and my sister have already got planning permission for houses, and a third house would have to be social housing. Social housing - in my dad's own garden. People always think we've got that wrong.
So that's another house that won't get built. And my brother, who is on a low wage, can't ever imagine being able to buy a house.

SomethingOnce, I believe it's partly to do with if you couldn't possibly have forseen needing social care/care home at the point you sold up/spent it/gave it away.
And there are things like trusts, which may be able to protect house from care fees.
But it is absolutely vital to get independent advice.

I maybe completely wrong, but Ialways thought transferral of money / assets to family had to offer happened 7 years or more before you die? (I appreciate you don't know when you will die)