My Lords, I profoundly disagree with that case. I will refer a little later to my own experience of dealing with these matters.
I understand from the DCLG website that older people now occupy nearly one-third of all houses in the United Kingdom, and nearly two-thirds of the projected increase in the number of households over the next 17 or 18 years will be headed by someone over 65. We have an ageing population going into housing all over the country, the vast majority of which is simply not intended for that purpose and has not been adapted. Very often, the people who are moving cannot afford to adapt the housing because they fall within a means-testing system, which sometimes they find embarrassing or sometimes leaves them on the margin and they do not really want to spend the money.
I understand that the Government have introduced a disabled facilities grant, home improvement agencies and FirstStop advice centres. The National Planning Policy Framework asked local authorities to assess housing requirements, including for the elderly. But that is just not enough.
In a case that I was involved in—and I understand it is quite common because I talked to the salesmen from the various lift companies, such as Stannah and Acorn, who visit people’s homes—the issue was the depth of the stairlift. Many stairlifts on the market can be fitted only in homes that have stairs of a certain width. Many homes cannot take British lifts and people buy the German lift because that is a narrower lift going up the stairs. I would have thought that it would be simple for the Government to insist, whether through the Building Regulations or whatever, that when companies are building houses, the stairs are of at least a certain width to enable lifts to be fitted when, inevitably, they will be required in a very large number of homes in the United Kingdom as the population of this country gets older and we reflect on the statistics on the huge increase in households headed by people over 65.
Dealing with the point that the noble Baroness has just made—she has reservations about quotas and so on—I cannot see why we cannot lay down really important standards of that nature so we can get over the problem. That is exactly what the amendment in the name of the noble Baroness, Lady Greengross, deals with. It refers specifically to the requirement to,
“have special regard to the local need for such accommodation”.
There is no reason at all why most houses cannot be built within a spec that is easily adaptable for disabled requirements.