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House-building Programme

My Lords, I apologise to the House for the fact that, due to a last-minute change in a medical appointment, I had to miss a lot of the earlier part of the debate. No discourtesy was intended. The economic and social implications of the housing programme will be a disaster if everyone concerned does not take into account the enormous demographic change in our society. I do not mean only that we should build houses for older people, but refer to the huge changes in terms of different social mores, marriage patterns, family structures and, above all, the drop in the fertility rate and the change in balance between old and young people in the population. We need a lifetime approach to housing. It is essential to us all. Often we think about community healthcare and social care, but we do not always build it around housing, which is the core for us at certain stages in our lives. We need to make it the core around which lives are built and the environment, particularly the built environment, is centred. Integrated approaches are excellent. They have to take into account all those factors. The new regional spatial strategies make that clear. They have not been taken up everywhere but are being taken up in the south east. I hope that the approach will become the norm and that authorities will have to justify not making it so, because it is so important for the future. We need an inclusive housing approach by having lifetime housing that can adapt to changes as we go through life. Some countries have taken that further forward than us. What we need when we have young children changes when they are teenagers. Now many teenagers stay around for a long time, go away and come back again because they cannot afford to get on the housing ladder, have partners—married or unmarried—and children, and so on. Later on, we have older caring responsibilities and need flexible housing. It is possible to build it—it is done in some areas—so that the housing itself can be adapted to those changing needs. With an aging population, it is important to have obviously accessible housing and to adapt housing, so that disabilities can be encompassed easily in new housing structures. As the population ages, an awful lot more acquired disabilities need to be accommodated in our housing plans. I want to talk for a minute on changing family structures. We have to take into account and accept the fact that, in our aging population, many people wait until the children grow up and, if they are in an unsatisfactory relationship, break up. Often they find themselves a new partner, but they do not always want to share 24 hours of the day with them. An emerging pattern is partnerships but not full-time ones, so that you have a new but quite normal procedure of being together but apart. In many European countries, that is becoming frequent as an arrangement because of the changes in working patterns, and because women in particular now want autonomy. We all want a certain autonomy in our domestic arrangements. We know that the housing shortage is, in part, due to the fact that there are now so many single-person households. That kind of trend—with people being in a relationship at one point but not at another—adds to the need for single-person dwellings, which of course intensify the housing shortage. Therefore, family structures need to be taken into account. Because of the increasing numbers of older people, we must also think about the services that are required for people to remain independent and autonomous in later life. Many such services can be provided by peripatetic organisations. Sometimes that is not enough, and the loneliness and isolation of later life can be very well combated by extra-care housing. We know about that: the Joseph Rowntree Foundation has created a wonderful example of it just outside York, where people are autonomous and have their independence but services are provided as and when they are needed. There are other exemplary situations around the country where the changing needs of people are catered for from total independence to a requirement for some care. When looking realistically at the alternatives for people as they get older, we must take into account that transport is very important. There is no point in living in a nice environment if you are imprisoned in it and cannot get to the doctor or see your family and friends. So we need a decent transport system around any community—one which, if we are looking to the future, takes into account the fact that commuting patterns will change enormously due to changes in work patterns and in the population. That is part of what I have been saying all along. We need new forms of transport which take into account the age and physical abilities of the people who use them. Not everyone works from nine to five; sometimes they work at home or in centres near their home, and that must affect our transport policies. It is also important that the needs of the older population are taken into account when we consider leisure—parks and other facilities—and there are marvellous examples of that. The International Longevity Centre—UK—I declare an interest as its chief executive—is carrying out work with planners and other professional partners, including the Anchor Trust, in providing a tool for planners which will help them to segment their future population accurately. That can be done better in London than around London and in the rest of the country, and it will help people to plan realistically for our population needs as we go forward in this century.