If you’re not yet 60, if you eat your greens and take long walks, one day, with any luck, you might be!

If you are over 60 and own a semi-detached house, according to housing minister Chris Pincher you’re ‘rattling around in it’ and should sell up and move into a one-bedroom property, because you’re a ‘barrier’ preventing a young family moving into the home you worked all your life to pay for.

I bet when you sometimes struggled to pay the monthly mortgage and the mortgage protection premiums, you never imagined a government minister would, with cold indifference, refer to you not as a hardworking, diligent citizen, but a ‘barrier’.

The following are his words – not mine.

“38% of properties are currently under-occupied, too big for the people rattling around in them. There’s an opportunity to encourage downsizing and the later living sector*, which will free up two & three bedroom semis”.

*The later living sector are small properties specifically for older people that he’s encouraging developers to build more of.

Let’s be honest. Not all older people want to be surrounded by other old people or live somewhere that’s a third of the size of their previous home.
I don’t know what’s more ridiculous – that ‘Penny’ Pincher has no idea what goes on outside the Westminster Bubble or his full title is ‘Minister of Housing, Communities and Levelling Up’!

Presumably when he was made a minister, along with his portfolio he was handed a spirit level.

In the real world, many three-bedroom semis only have two decent sized bedrooms plus a tiny box room.

Hardly a vast mansion to ‘rattle around in’.

As he’s also Communities Minister, ‘Penny’ Pincher should know that more than 100.000 marriages break down every year, forcing many sons and daughters to move back into the parental home, often bringing their own children with them.

If their parents have downsized to a one-bedroom flat, I’d be interested to know how ‘Penny’ Pincher plans to solve the potentially huge problem of where their children and grandchildren can seek alternative refuge after a marriage breakdown.

I’m going to keep my eye on Mr Pincher.

I think we all should.