One of the joys of not being a politician is that you can say things that are true but unpopular. Unlike me, however, British politicians need to win votes and there is one very clear point of consensus: nobody must touch the family home.
Last week, Andy Burnham put social care at the centre of Labour’s offer to older voters. His proposed National Care Service would provide free personal care, with the political promise that getting old should not mean watching a lifetime’s savings disappear into care bills.
This week, Kemi Badenoch went further. A future Conservative government, she announced, would ensure that “nobody will ever pay inheritance tax on their family home”. Couples would also be able to pass on another £1 million tax-free, which amounts to an enormous incentive to avoid inheritance tax by putting all your assets in housing at the end of your life.
Different parties. Different policies. Same object of devotion.
This is one of the stranger features of British politics. We do not simply own homes. The family home is simultaneously a pension, an inheritance, a savings account, a monument to hard work, and a sacred object that no Chancellor, care provider, or tax collector should ever be allowed to disturb.
This defines our endless debates about land tax reform, stamp duty scrapping and inheritance tax.
To be frank, for the housing market as a whole, this is a complete disaster. It could be argued that this would be tolerable if it were good for older people themselves, but all the data points suggest the opposite.
We have somehow confused staying in your home for as long as possible with ageing well. It is obvious that the house that worked brilliantly when you were 45, at the peak of your earning power, with children upstairs and a mortgage to pay, may be considerably less brilliant at 80.
There is some fairly grim evidence of this.
Around 1.5 million people aged 65 and over in England live in homes that fail the Government’s Decent Homes Standard. Nearly 900,000 live in homes containing the most serious category of health or safety hazard.
These are not people suffering from an excess of spare bedrooms. These are homes that can be dangerously cold, in poor repair or contain serious hazards.
And a lot of older people would actually quite like an alternative.
Imagine you are 75. You own a comfortable house. Your friends live nearby. You know the neighbours. The GP is ten minutes away and the spare room is where the grandchildren sleep.
Perhaps the stairs are becoming annoying, or an active health hazard. The garden is more work than fun. Heating four bedrooms for two people increasingly feels like an eccentric use of money.
But, ultimately, moving is hard. The months of deciding what to throw away. Getting the kids back to clear out their childhood bedrooms. The lost memories.
So people stay, often until a move that could have been a positive choice at 70 becomes a necessity at 85, at which point questions around inheritance are long underway and staying in position is the safest option to pass on a nest egg for your kids. Our tax treatment of housing incentivises this decision at every stage, and we are about to make it considerably worse.
It also creates an enormous problem for everyone else. Nearly three in five households headed by someone aged 65 or over now have at least two more bedrooms than the official measure says they need. That is 4.3 million homes that would be better for families to fill.
Without a major increase in housebuilding, a family wanting a four-bedroom house needs someone to leave one for them to move into. That then triggers a domino effect; their old three-bed becomes available to another family and eventually a flat becomes available for a first-time buyer.
To be clear, nobody has behaved badly. There are simply not enough chairs changing hands.
We spend enormous amounts of time worrying about how to get younger people onto the housing ladder, while doing remarkably little to make the ladder itself move.
The answer is obviously not to force older people out of their homes, but it also obviously isn’t to give them an enormous tax incentive to buy a mansion at 85 to avoid inheritance tax!
I am aware that none of this wins votes, but if we want the housing market to build ownership and equity in society again, then we need to stop treating it like a shrine.