Mr. Seán Moynihan:

I thank the committee for the invitation to today's meeting. ALONE supports older people to age at home. There are many hidden issues with regard to housing for older people. Housing is vital to meet the need of people to remain independent. One in five older people need support to age at home, regardless of house ownership or house type. We believe that all models will need some support structures and technology to enable people to age at home. Housing linked to community support is absolutely vital to reduce the pressure on residential nursing home care and acute hospital care and to allow older people to remain at home, where they want to be.

Housing for older people is already a significant problem, however. More than one in eight older people has housing problems, and of the last 1,400 cases of older people who have come to us for support between 70 and 90 years of age, housing is the second biggest issue. At the back of our short submission we have outlined what we believe is a spectrum of housing, the different types of housing that are available. There is no one size that fits all. All options have a role to play but to varying degrees. Up and down the country there are some marvellous examples of housing that have been developed, usually by local champions, by people putting in great efforts and bringing people together. We need to develop models that are transferable, scalable, can work in both urban and rural settings and are designed to age-friendly principles.

From our work we have come up with recommendations as a result of the stories and challenges of the people who come to us. Our proposals include: to review and update Rebuilding Ireland to reflect the needs of an ageing Ireland; to provide funding towards developing new age-friendly models of housing; to provide more public housing for older people requiring varying levels of support; to provide grant funding for housing adaptation to meet demand in a consistent and user-friendly manner; to implement long-term renting options; and to update the pension scheme in the light of reduced ownership because our whole pension scheme is based on house ownership, which is decreasing. On house ownership, people may not realise that more than half of older people have housing condition problems. The housing adaptation grant, HAG, is run differently in every county, is complex and is not funded to meet demand. We feel a key thing that could be done, relatively quickly, is to address these issues to support people to remain in their own homes.

House ownership is dropping at approximately 1% each year. This means several thousand older people are now retiring into private rented accommodation. Private rented accommodation is not suited to many older people because, ultimately and legitimately, one is only 224 days away from becoming homeless. When older people lose their homes, they lose their community, their friends, their support and everything around them. They cannot compete on fixed income in a rising rent market. Our proposal to address that is to have long-term leases to provide greater security. More public housing for older people should be provided so that people who are on the housing list or have been renting all of their lives could possibly buy in to that. There are other elements along the continuum of shared houses, retirement villages, and downsizings. While these have a role to play, we believe only a small percentage of people will go into these. They could require a large amount of effort and a large amount of money. Without alternative housing options, if one does decide to downsize, where is one going to go? Where is one going to go in one's own community? We need to move away from downsizing a little bit, as an immediate solution. Maybe it is a long-term solution on the basis of having housing choices for older people and they will choose to downsize.

On approved housing bodies, under Rebuilding Ireland, there is only one location for housing with on-site support. The demand for this type of housing is in the thousands. Currently, there is one location. On the basis that, by 2022, we are going to be 600 nursing home beds short, we will therefore need to create alternatives, as other countries have. That leads us to the proposal that we need to review Rebuilding Ireland, to reflect an ageing Ireland that takes account of the support that older people require on and off site.

As we look at that spectrum, our work in Alone is to try to work out the demand, by community health care organisation CHO area, and by council area for all these different types of houses. We hope by the middle of June to be in a position to produce those demand figures so we can then start discussing how we meet the demand for all of those different areas. As soon as we have that work finished we will share it with the committee.