Family home could be next source of revenue for NHS

London’s Mayor and Secretary of State for Housing Sajid Javid is believed not to have made much progress with providing homes for hard pressed inhabitants of his city compared to his predecessor Boris Johnston. Yet he declared this week he wanted to see more beautiful houses being built with technology increasing the potential to meet the needs and expectations of the community. No one, he says, wants to live in or live next door to brick boxes that could be anywhere and there is no reason why they should have to. This week he hosted a design conference in the capital involving 400 experts to ensure not just more but better homes will be built. Great news for millennials. Or is it just pie in the housing sky?

On the other hand leading London architect Patrik Schumacher declared this week in a paper published by the Adam Smith Institute that millennials don’t need living rooms and that centrally located ``hotel-room sized’’ studio flats are ideal for busy young people. Can’t you just imagine what living in a box the size of an hotel bedroom might do to one’s emotional status long-term? The mortgage might be small but not much else appeals. A London based campaign group Generation Rent is not overly impressed fearing that building lots of small flats would risk tearing up communities. The Lord Mayor may not approve.

These residential boxes might never materialise of course, but let’s assume they do and ask yourself how long would it be before the idea hits Northern Ireland where millennials also struggle to afford a mortgage for even the tiniest home.

Now, the other side of this issue is to do with the baby boomer generation who were fortunate to be young and unafraid of hard work in an era when new housing estates were springing up everywhere, big enough to cope with a subsequent children and even the family pets, with enough space for the odd overnight guest.

Mortgages weren’t cheap but neither was renting so most of us opted to buy. Today, with mortgages paid off we are sitting pretty, so thinks the Government. In fact the powers that be have decided we have too much money altogether and our homes should be sold to pay for our social care if it’s needed. Never mind the fact we paid all our working lives for our NHS care through taxes and indeed most of us are still paying tax. Theresa May is all for pensioners paying more for social care and Simon Stevens, head of the NHS claims the £1.5trillion ``accumulated housing wealth’’ held by those of us in retirement should be claimed by councils for care costs. He thinks this would be fair giving the ``unbalanced’’ increase in taxes for working-age adults.

Wealthy people can protect their homes from any state grabs by tenants-in-common arrangements or Trusts. It’s harder for those whose wealth is the family home. English based Councils are fairly ruthless when it comes to having social care paid for by families and it’s going that way here too.

Yet it should not have been like this in this 70th anniversary year of the NHS. What became an unwieldy behemoth began with the best intentions in 1948 – national insurance was paid by workers to the Government which was supposed to invest it in a fund to pay for future pensions and health requirements. In no time at all, as described in the Daily Telegraph this week, it became `just another tax with the revenues going into the general pool for all public spending’. In 2002 an extra £8.2 billon was charged in taxes to `boost funding for health’ but the Labour government of the day `did not specifically allocate it to the NHS’. So, that is why, today, my generation is faced with our homes being purloined by the State for our care, if it is needed, when we paid out the money all those years ago (still paying) and the Government spent it on something else. An ageing generation is left worried that sickness could leave them homeless, the fault of successive, inept Governments.