With the launch earlier this month of what is expected to be a year-long inquiry by the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Housing and Care for Older People at Westminster, inter-generational cohousing is an idea whose time might well have come.

By "cohousing": residents committing to being "good neighbours" to each other, from their own individual homes (which they might even have had a hand in designing) in a spirit of sharing (such as cars, power tools and food growing).

And by "inter-generational": a mix of younger and older households, with the former pledging to do much of the heavy lifting, potentially extending to providing informal social care.

The APPG says it is “focusing on creating mixed-age communities, both in mainstream and specialist housing” – and arguably not a moment too soon.

While cohousing is widely recognised as an antidote to loneliness, the question remains to what extent it has the capacity to prevent or........

© Herald Scotland