Elderly people can end up in oversized or unsafe homes if they retire to the countryside, a think tank report has said.

The Social Market Foundation warned that the older age profiles of some areas were creating growing pressures on services and local economies. 

Scott Corfe, the research director at the cross-party think tank, said there could be “unforeseen consequences” to older people moving from urban areas to the coast or countryside.

“Too many retirees end up in unsuitable, oversized and often unsafe homes, while rising property prices exclude younger families from local housing,” he said. “Local authority areas where the majority of residents are over 65 could struggle to provide their populations with adequate services, and such communities may lack cohesion and intergenerational mixing.”

Many rural parts of the UK have ageing populations, and almost all the top 20 local authorities forecast to have the highest proportion of over-65 households by 2043 are either rural or coastal.

Increasing housing supply pressures in rural areas

Mr Corfe said: “Housing options that allowed more older people to choose to retire in towns and cities would offer benefits to retirees, to urban economies and to wider society.”  

It is estimated that two million older people suffer physical and mental ill-health, and even death, due to living in substandard or inaccessible homes.

The research found increasing housing supply pressures in rural areas meant older people often remained in under-occupied homes due to a lack of suitable or desirable accommodation elsewhere. On average, rural residents in England spend a third more to heat and power their homes than urban households.

At the start of this year, experts warned that government policy on climate change home efficiency would trigger a mass sale of rural rental properties, intensifying the countryside’s housing crisis.

The Government’s climate change adviser has previously described pressures from people who move from urban to rural areas to “urbanise the countryside” as “antagonistic” to dealing with climate change.

Lord Deben, the chairman of the climate change committee, said: “When people move into the countryside you just have to say to them that this is not the town and you don’t have street lighting in the village, you have a torch – that’s how you do it.”