A unifying voice for the retirement home sector
We are the voice of our members and the whole UK retirement home industry, influencing policy nationally and locally, promoting retirement home living, and producing industry good practice guidance to raise standards across the sector.
How we’re making a difference
We have four main areas of activity:
- Developing strategic input to national and local policy that affects the retirement housing sector. This is based on our members’ experience.
- Engaging with decision-makers to influence policy issues.
- Publishing reports and briefings on key issues. These are available to members to support them in developing their own schemes and practice.
- Developing toolkits for our members. This includes a sector-specific housing needs assessment model enabling assessment of the local level of demand for housing by older people across all tenures.
Solving the retirement housing shortfall
Increasing the supply of housing specifically designed to meet the needs of our ageing population is essential if we are to give people the means of staying safely and socially in a home of their own well into old age.
However, compared to mainstream housing, retirement housing is costly and complicated to build, due to the higher specification, additional communal areas and extra management services required. This barrier to market is compounded by local authorities routinely failing to allocate sufficient housing for the needs of their ageing population and wrongly assuming it will increase their health and social care costs.
Our policy asks
We want to see more choice, quality and affordability for older people when they consider their housing needs in later life. We have several key policy asks to achieve this, including the following:
- A new national strategy for an ageing population.
- New national definitions of housing for later life and establishing new national information and advice services to build consumer confidence, including greater transparency around fees and charges.
- Reform of the planning system to allow the creation of more new retirement homes, including:
- Local housing needs assessments should always include an assessment of the need for retirement housing by type and tenure
- Local plans should seek to ensure that a minimum of 10% of all new housing is specialist retirement housing (30k of the 300k national target for new homes), unless the local authority can demonstrate why this is not appropriate for their area
- The Government needs to address the long-term issue of viability and the impact of CIL, Planning Obligations and Affordable Housing on the delivery of specialist housing for older people
- Local authorities and public funding bodies should be required to proactively plan and monitor the delivery of retirement housing
- 10% of Homes England and GLA’s housing fund delivery should be allocated to shared ownership and affordable rented retirement housing schemes with support and care.
As the main membership organisation for the UK’s retirement housing sector, the Retirement Housing Group was a key member of the Older People’s Housing Taskforce, who delivered their final report in 2024. Working with our members, our aim is to make the most of this opportunity and deliver the taskforce’s proposals, securing a bright future for our sector, and for the UK’s older people. In line with the Taskforce’s recommendations, we want to increase the supply of new retirement properties from around 6-7,000 a year currently, to 30-50,000 a year. This will improve the housing choices for our aging population and help to free up housing stock for younger generations. Their recommendations included all of our long-standing policy asks:
Most of these policy changes do not require any government or taxpayer funding, they are simply adjustments to help retirement housing operators deliver the new housing we need.