A Better Way to Grow Old?

The prospect of ageing and ending life in a care home with strangers is one that few of us relish. And yet that is the reality for countless people every year in the UK. Can we do better?

This was a question regularly discussed among different groups of friends. We talked about purchasing a property together or finding a piece of land and building separate homes with perhaps a communal building at its centre. Far from utopian fantasies, these seemed like realisable plans. However, the conversation usually broke down when it came to questions of financing, residents passing on and inheritance, legal responsibilities and so forth.

Nevertheless, the idea has never been far from my mind, particularly since I moved five years ago to Tomich, a remote village in the Highlands with which I have had a long association, and as I approach retirement age. I love living here, and growing older shouldn't necessarily mean having to leave somewhere like this simply because the alternatives haven't been created. Rural Scotland presents particular challenges as people age: communities are dispersed, public transport and services can be limited, suitable smaller homes are scarce, and moving somewhere more manageable can mean leaving behind the community in which you have made your life. That makes me particularly interested in whether new forms of community-led housing could offer another choice — allowing people to remain independent, connected and rooted in places like this.

Two things recently gave these rather nebulous musings some focus. First, Andy Burnham's interest in reforming adult social care prompted me to think more seriously about the alternatives. Secondly, I finally started using an AI assistant, long after one of my best friends had been extolling its virtues.

Echo, my AI assistant, has been invaluable in helping me develop a proposal for a different approach — or at least part of one — to later-life living. The result was A National Enabling Framework for Later-Life Cohousing, a working proposal intended to explore how government might make it easier for ordinary groups of people to create durable, mutually supportive communities in later life.

I explained the framework of my idea to Echo, and she (sic) helped collate my thoughts into a presentable document. I made changes, Echo applied them and suggested others. It proved, somewhat to my surprise, a wonderfully collaborative process. But it also made me wonder whether AI might have a much more practical role in making communities like these possible.

After all, the ideas my friends and I discussed over the years rarely foundered through lack of enthusiasm. They foundered on the practicalities: finance, ownership, inheritance, legal responsibilities and finding both suitable properties and suitable people. These are precisely the areas in which an AI assistant could help a group research options, compare different models, identify questions requiring professional advice and navigate the considerable amount of information involved. It could even help bring together people looking for similar forms of community — matching not simply by age or location, but by what people actually want from communal living and what they might contribute to it. AI could not replace solicitors, financial advisers, housing professionals or, most importantly, the human relationships on which any successful community would depend. But it might help ordinary people get far enough along the road to make use of them.

Eventually, I had something I felt comfortable sharing with my niece, who happens to be a civil servant working in energy policy. She was sufficiently interested to share it with a colleague responsible for housing. Following a very productive and informative phone call, I was given a list of organisations and individuals who might help me share, test and refine the proposal before taking it any further.

And that is how I recently came to have a conversation with Jeremy Porteus at Housing LIN. I have since discovered that thousands of people are thinking along similar lines, and that numerous organisations are already developing and facilitating such ideas.

Which raises an obvious question: why aren't these alternatives better known and understood? Greater awareness, including at government level, could help many more people see such schemes as a viable alternative to what they currently regard as their only options for later life — and, crucially, encourage them to start making those plans before the choices are made for them.

Perhaps the real question is not whether we can do better, but how we make it easier for more of us to do so.

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If you found this of interest, the Housing LIN curates dedicated webpages on cohousing, where you can find a range of useful reports, blogs and case studies on a variety of community-led housing solutions for an ageing population.