In the run-up to Rachel Reeves’s 2025 Budget, the whispers are growing louder: older homeowners should “right-size”, “free up family homes”, “release equity”. It is a function of our current ignorance of what the Budget contains, particularly regarding possible new measures involving inheritance tax and stamp duty.
It’s also a politically convenient narrative that quietly shifts blame on to pensioners for the country’s housing crisis, when the real issue lies elsewhere: the failure to meet building targets.
It also entirely ignores any considerations other than the Government’s fiscal imperatives. What about pensioners’ lived experiences? Many have been in their homes for decades. Their walls are layered with family photographs, their rooms echo with memories of birthday parties and children’s footsteps. To ask someone in their seventies or eighties to pack up and leave the creak of familiar floorboards is not just a property transaction – it’s a fracture of roots and identity. Multiple studies show what we know instinctively: that relocation in later life increases risks of depression and cognitive decline, especially if involuntary.
Meanwhile, across Britain, young people are being squeezed into housing voids, with many young renters sharing flats with strangers and in “houseshares” without a shared living space, which has been converted to extra bedrooms to maximise yield.
The next generation is being forced into ever smaller, more compromised spaces – while older generations are encouraged to move out of theirs.
square PROPERTY AND MORTGAGES We downsized to go mortgage-free and enjoy retirement between Spain and the UK
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Yet successive governments – including Labour now – have persistently failed to build enough homes. Between July 2024 and September 2025, just 231,300 net additional homes were delivered in England — only 15 per cent of the 1.5 million target for its full term. Housebuilders are warning Labour will miss that pledge. Stories this past week revealed that the social housing build effort has virtually stalled, with some areas facing decades-long waits for family homes.
There is also a chronic shortage of housing suitable for over-65s. Age UK reports that more than a third are worried about affordability, still more about accessibility, and the majority say that moving after 75 would be difficult or impossible. Meanwhile, 1.2 million over-55s have wanted to downsize, but abandoned plans partly because bungalows (their preferred option) are vanishing – now, barely 1 per cent of new builds.
Older people are being asked to bear the burden for systemic policy failure: to relocate, deplete their independence, and sacrifice mental and emotional stability – all so that younger generations might find a foothold in property. This logic is backwards.
What if, instead of pressuring pensioners to vacate their homes, the pressure was placed on ministers to keep promises? Or, if the narrative recognised that housing scarcity is a policy failure, not pensioners’ moral failing? What if “downsizing” were a choice, not coercion?
Ahead of Reeves’s Budget, the Government should remember that homes are not just financial assets. Taking homes from older people without delivering alternatives is a kind of social erasure. If this crisis is to be solved, we need guts, not guilt: we need to build at scale – urgently and sustainably – for every generation.
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