BRIAN Derbyshire refers to government moves to put a time limit on occupancy in relation to suitability of matching a social housing tenant to the accommodation provided.
Having grown up in a council house, I understand Brian’s point of view. The fabric of an estate is the people who live there, but maybe this comes from a time when availability met demand.
Today, we see a higher demand for social housing and it is a juggling act to match available property to the needs of those requiring it.
My mother-in-law lives in a large three-bedroom council house. She had seven children and at the time this was a full house. But over the past 30 to 40 years, her children have flown the nest, her husband passed away and now she live alone in a house suitable for a family.
Surrounded by memories and people she has known most of her adult life, the moral question is whether it is right that she should occupy a house that no longer meets her needs, when it could be better used to house a growing family?
The answer lies in my own parents’ story, similar to that of my mother-in-law, who took a council house in 1958 when it was built, lived there through the growth of her family, seeing us leave one-by-one and then coming to terms with the reality that the house they occupied no longer met their requirement.
My father was of the mind: “I will be out of here feet first.” It took a lot of discussion for my sisters and myself to get him to see that he would be better off in a pensioner’s bungalow and to make the decision to move whilst he had health and time on his side, rather than waiting until something happened that would dictate he should move.
Eventually he applied for a bungalow, being very specific in what and where he would move to, the bargaining tool being he had something they wanted, and he had the health and time to wait. It took 12 months for the right place to come available and he moved into a great place and lived there until recently when he passed away.
The answer is to plan ahead but, for this to succeed, we need more suitable accommodation for our ageing population. Not egg box, barrack-style accommodation, but bungalow estates similar to those built in the 1950s. Rather than develop Cutacre into another estate of empty warehouses, let’s build an estate of bungalows, thus creating an elderly village that could have centralised medical facilities, daycare and be more suitable to meet the requirement of our elderly. In turn, this would free up under-occupied accommodation, making it available for families.
Occupancy of social housing is not ownership, but that does not mean you should not be treated with dignity or respect, yet making it reasonable to expect people to understand that life changes and they have to change their expectations.
Andrew Davidson Bury
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