Professor Alan Barrett:

I will be careful about this in general after the experience. The question we tried to answer in the research was whether there are hundreds of thousands of old-older people and if much housing space could be freed up. The evidence was a little mixed. Rather than the paper being reported as the ESRI investigating this policy, it was reported that the ESRI proposed this policy, and we got into serious trouble with many people. One of the crucial elements of the policy, as we mentioned in the paper, was ensuring older people can move within neighbourhoods. It is a terribly bad idea for older people to move away from their neighbourhoods. We know from increasing amounts of evidence that loneliness can be as big a killer as many of standard health issues.