Legal & General’s later living business, Inspired Villages, achieves 4th major planning win since lockdown
Inspired Villages has achieved outline planning permission to deliver a £100 million retirement community on the edge of Tunbridge Wells. Creating 146 new homes, this planning approval is the fourth achieved by Inspired Villages since lockdown began bringing the total number of consented new homes secured this year to 788.
The approval is an important step forward in addressing the severe shortage of age-appropriate housing in the UK, as highlighted in a recent joint report from The Centre for the Study of Financial Innovation and ARCO1. Currently there are more than 12m over 65s in the UK and this figure is expected to increase by 41% to nearly 18m by 20402. However, only 7,000 units are being delivered to market each year, so the disparity between supply and demand is vast due to complications in the planning stages.
A radical change in housing provision to meet our rapidly ageing population is not only crucial for wellbeing, but also for helping our overburdened NHS and social care services. This was starkly evidenced in the recent Home Builders Federation report, Healthier and Happier3, which calculated that building an extra 30,000 retirement living homes would create a fiscal saving of £2.1 billion annually.
PDF file: IVG planning achieved at Tunbridge Wells PDF size: 160KB