Mr. Rodd Bond:

I thank the Chairman and members for extending to me the opportunity to appear before the committee.

Last year, as part of its sustainable development goals, SDGs, the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, UN-DESA, brought forward the older persons 2030 agenda for sustainable development. While the achievement of many of the SDGs are supported and reinforced by housing policies and actions, we see goal 11, to "Make cities, communities, and human settlements [age] inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable" and goal 3, to "Ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages" as the relevant overarching global, European and national policy objectives before us.

Regardless of the varying pressures and dynamics of ageing we see between urban and rural Ireland, there is an imperative to align our efforts towards more smart, sustainable and inclusive development for all ages. There are three transpositions, or prospective shifts to viewing the topic that I would like to make, that may open up a solution space in the landscape before us.

The first transposition is to reframe the challenge, to move from meeting the needs of housing for older persons to meeting the housing needs of persons as they age. Housing for older people is not a segmented cohort problem. Ageing, and associated age-related decline in functioning is a universal reality facing us all. We need universal, mainstream and inclusive responses that, over time, will make much of our housing stock adaptive and fit for purpose, for all of us, in an ageing society.

The second transposition is to reframe the challenge and to move from meeting the housing needs of persons as they age to meeting the home needs for persons as they age. The term "home" or "housing" risks limiting our considerations to bricks and mortar, and to a transactional view of place as primarily property and financial assets. While these are very important, they do risk diminishing the value, meaning and sense of home, of place and of belonging that is so vital to our physical and spiritual well-being. Along with protection and shelter, home encompasses the locus of our social connectedness, attachment, neighbourhood, family, our sense of security and identity. Location - the sense of adjacency, density, amenity and quality, both physical and environmental - and desire - our attachment to place, community and intergenerational solidarity - are all interwoven elements in this rich milieu of home and place. These motivations do not fade as we age. They intensify.

The third transposition I would like to make to reframe the challenge is to move from meeting the home needs of persons as they age to empowering persons to meet their home needs as we age. At the heart of this issue are the questions: whose problem is it, what mechanisms and choices are available to us to address it, and what is the price of failure, or better, the value of success? These are interconnected, but we do know that the price of failure is a latter life of poor quality; reduced participation, isolation, and reduced health and well-being, and poor overall system and service effectiveness; and, an over-reliance on long-term residential nursing care, avoidable hospital admissions and readmissions, and slower discharges. Empowerment is a complex mix of rights, responsibilities, capabilities and choices, energised by both awareness and desire. While there is innovation in the public sector, today there is very little evidence that mainstream housing market mechanisms have brought forward many appropriate options to allow currently unaware persons to exercise either their choices or their responsibilities to plan and act for more successful ageing.

Today, there is no market functioning at scale that makes available universal homes in sustainable neighbourhoods. Empowering persons to meet their home needs as they age is a societal responsibility, and I suggest that the housing market needs to be stimulated, or incentivised, to engage in greater innovation to address and seed initial supply. With the right mix of partners, risks could be spread across multiple stakeholders across the value chain, and for a defined period of time, in a range of public-private pilot engagements, to offer choice, test demand and evaluate socioeconomic impact. Such housing and health policy experimentation needs to be holistic, to address planning, design, support service, digital and financial innovation.

With an age-dependency ratio approaching 1:2 by 2060, this is more than a specialised housing problem for a cohort. It requires a paradigm shift in how we collectively envisage and approach the challenge of our housing stock for current and future generations. It will require aware citizens with the opportunities and freedoms to respond, plan and choose their solutions for their futures. I think right now it requires public policy experimentation to create the conditions to foster innovation so that citizens can exercise choices to age in place soon, and into the future.