Tag: Design

The APPG inquiry found there were far reaching benefits from developing good quality housing for older people, including a reduction in health and social care costs, as well as the freeing up of family housing and has made a series of recommendations to create movement in the housing market, improve the health of older people and create new housing options for younger people and families. These include:

• A Cabinet Office Task Force should bring together the Departments of Health and for Communities and Local Government to take forward the nationwide drive to build the homes needed by an ageing population
• The Department for Communities and Local Government should encourage and incentivise the private sector and registered social landlords to meet the rising demand of those seeking to move to elegant, functional, sustainable and manageable homes for later life
• The Department of Health should tailor its £300m Health, Care and Support Housing Fund to ensure more schemes are designed to HAPPI principles
• Private sector and registered social landlords, with government support, should develop a HAPPI kite mark to raise HAPPI’s market profile
• Working alongside local authorities, the Homes and Communities Agency should lead in championing HAPPI to ensure that a clear targeted strategy for housing older people forms part of every local plan and that, where necessary, appropriate sites are brought forward specifically to fill any identified shortfall in market provision
• Planners should recognise the special nature of high-quality retirement housing in their requirements for affordable housing and for Community Infrastructure Levy charges
• Local housing and social care departments should give strategic priority to assessing and investing in older people’s housing; and maintain accessible housing registers

Author: Housing our Ageing Population Panel for Innovation

Publication date: 2012

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The authors make the following recommendations for design of housing for older people:

• New retirement homes should have generous internal space standards, with potential for three habitable rooms and designed to accommodate flexible layouts.
• Care is taken in the design of homes and shared spaces, with the placement, size and detail of windows, and to ensure plenty of natural light, and to allow daylight into circulation spaces.
• Building layouts maximise natural light and ventilation by avoiding internal corridors and single-aspect flats, and apartments have balconies, patios, or terraces with enough space for tables and chairs as well as plants
• In the implementation of measures to ensure adaptability, homes are designed to be ‘care ready’ so that new and emerging technologies, such as telecare and community equipment, can be readily installed.
• Building layouts promote circulation areas as shared spaces that offer connections to the wider context, encouraging interaction, supporting interdependence and avoiding an ‘institutional feel’, including the imaginative use of shared balcony access to front doors and thresholds, promoting natural surveillance and providing for ‘defensible space’.
• In all but the smallest developments (or those very close to existing community facilities), multi-purpose space is available for residents to meet, with facilities designed to support an appropriate range of activities – perhaps serving the wider neighbourhood as a community ‘hub’, as well as guest rooms for visiting friends and families.
• In giving thought to the public realm, design measures ensure that homes engage positively with the street, and that the natural environment is nurtured through new trees and hedges and the preservation of mature planting, and providing wildlife habitats as well as colour, shade and shelter.
• Homes are energy-efficient and well insulated, but also well ventilated and able to avoid overheating by, for example, passive solar design, the use of native deciduous planting supplemented by external blinds or shutters, easily operated awnings over balconies, green roofs and cooling chimneys.
• Adequate storage is available outside the home together with provision for cycles and mobility aids, and that storage inside the home meets the needs of the occupier.
• Shared external surfaces, such as ‘home zones’, that give priority to pedestrians rather than cars, and which are proving successful in other countries, become more common, with due regard to the kinds of navigation difficulties that some visually impaired people may experience in such environments.

Author: Housing our Ageing Population Panel for Innovation

Publication date: 2009

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