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Letter: We Need More Suitable, Smaller Homes To Encourage Downsizing

Published on: 29 Jun, 2025
Updated on: 29 Jun, 2025

From Julian Lyon

In response to: Greenfield, Greenbelt Site Deemed ‘Greybelt’ by Planning Inspector

Mark Stamp, in his comment on the linked article, says more should be done to encourage “down-sizing”.

Without wishing to dampen anyone’s ambition to accommodate their families in enlarged houses, one of the challenges we have is that there are increasingly fewer small homes as loft extensions and other extensions of the existing housing stock turn three-bed houses into four or five-bed homes.

The economic case for expansion and conversion rather than upsizing is compelling. The cost of moving would often be better employed in upgrading an existing house.

One of the barriers to down-sizing, therefore, is that decreasing pool of suitable destination homes, for which there is competition from even smaller family units upsizing from one or two-bedroomed flats perhaps.

There is plenty of statistical evidence from the census reports to indicate how many households have too few bedrooms versus those who have too many. In principle, this makes its way into the required housing mix for new development in the Local Plan.

Stamp Duty Land Tax on purchases certainly do not help a down-sizer, and VAT on improvements may also add to the barriers.

Mr Stamp makes a perfectly valid point about unused bedrooms, and perhaps a VAT-holiday for two years after down-sizing and a Stamp Duty exemption on down-sizing might help.

Overall however, the lack of availability of suitable smaller homes (resulting from national and local planning policy failures over forty to fifty years) and fiscal disincentives which are only getting worse, mean that we are unlikely to be able to move the needle.

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