**3. Obstacles to opportunity**

And, yes, dedicated retirement developments are being built, but nowhere near enough (or in the right places) to meaningfully move any dial, or for the calls for more *Perspective Chapter: Is Expecting Older People to Downsize to Help Solve the Nation's Housing… DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.5772/intechopen.108047*

older people to downsize to represent a realistic possibility. Only 2.5% of the UK's 29 million dwellings are technically defined as "retirement housing" according to a recent report from the Urban Land Institute [7] while the number of purpose-built homes also offering care services is far less, at around 0.7% of UK housing stock.

Neither are the statistics likely to significantly improve any time soon. According to Laing & Buisson in their 2021 review of the senior housing sector [8], "We expect the number of specialist seniors housing units in the UK will grow by 9% over the next five years to just short of 820,000 units. Yet, even with this forecast expansion, the rate of delivery will still be dwarfed by the UK's ageing population, deepening the existing imbalance between supply and demand."

They go on to say: "The benefits of a larger seniors housing sector to society are substantial. Yet, just 20% of local authorities in England have supportive planning policies or sites allocated to seniors housing."

In their July 2022 report, "Later Living: The £30bn Baby Boomer Challenge" [9], property experts JLL estimate that "an ageing population will require an additional 75,000 later living homes and 30,000 care homes over the next four years." Neither of which are remotely likely to happen.

Critics of retirement housing proposals during planning applications regularly point to existing schemes not being fully occupied. But this can be down to a series of factors, not least location: many prospective older home buyers will resist moving away from their immediate neighbourhood – with its ready-made network of support and social contact. To square that particular circle, we need more choice local to where people currently live, and with so few units being built each year, that level of choice currently does not exist.

Small wonder there is a lot of resentment building up among those who are being made to feel fingers are being wagged in their direction: yes, there's a housing crisis, but whose fault is that? The plain fact is, we simply aren't building enough new homes full stop – let alone enough suitable housing for older people, many of whom would elect to live in mainstream housing if it was better adapted to their needs.

Lest we forget, our population continues to grow: albeit Brexit has skewed figures (probably) short term, it's around 0.5% per annum – an additional 350,000 people a year. Against that, in England we reached the dizzy heights of 160,000 new homes in 2019 before sliding back to 123,000 in 2020 [10]. A 2020 Building Research Establishment (BRE) report found we now have the oldest housing stock in Europe [11] and that, to replace it at current rates, each new build will need to last 1000 years. No wonder we have over four million poor quality homes in the UK, over half of which are occupied by older people.
