Social Housing

It is well recognised that the failings in policy and delivery of housing over decades in this state has left considerable numbers of people in our society struggling to access decent public and affordable housing and a secure future that this allows for families. This situation is only getting worse. Moreover, pressure on housing in some urban centres is presented, opportunistically by some as a contributary factor in recent abhorrent intimidation of immigrant families in Belfast and elsewhere.

Whilst it is welcomed that the NI Executive has, after 26 years in power, placed public and social housing as one of the 9 key pillars of the draft Programme for Government currently out for public consultation, the continuing failure to provide a housing budget based upon need for the NI Housing Executive to enable it to deliver its housing statutory and contractual obligations across NI means that the vision for the future cannot be realised without a fundamental rethink and significant increase to public funding. 

A generation is entering the labour market today who face a prospect of lifelong exploitation by rack-renting private sector landlords. Only a small proportion will be able to buy their own homes and there is little to no chance of getting low-rent public housing. For many the options are couch-surfing, living with parents or staying with friends, offering no hopes for young people to achieve independent living or the possibility of setting up a home for themselves.

The social housing waiting list currently stands at almost 48,000 households, of whom more than 36,000 are deemed to be in housing stress. In 2021, the Department of Communities published a draft 15-year housing supply strategy which set out a goal of 100,000 new houses but only one third of these were to be social or ‘affordable’ housing. But even that target was too ambitious. In the next three years only 2,852 social housing units were completed and the rate of building is set to fall precipitously by 70% in the current year to only 500 as a result of the severe cuts imposed under the Finance Minister’s recent budget. 

As part of a co-ordinated, focused and energetic plan to promote a more equitable society we call on the Stormont Executive to urgently expand and re-prioritise its Housing Policy within the draft Programme for Government. Specifically, we call on Ministers to:

• Draft a Policy with a clear orientation toward improving socially oriented housing provision;
• Make the necessary changes in the governance and finance structures in the Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE) to enable it to borrow against its assets to kickstart a massive public housing building and upgrade programme, thereby creating thousands of construction jobs and hundreds of apprenticeships.
• Undertake a review of the structures required for public housing provision, with a view to creating the conditions to establish more democratic and accountable structures through the development of local municipalism to work alongside the NIHE in transforming the delivery of public and affordable housing and the rights of tenants within it, such as

Changing the ONS classification of the NIHE by Treasury to allow it to publicly borrow to build new social housing such as Councils in GB can currently avail of. 

• in addition to the provision of decent public housing, expand the range of housing type and tenancy structures to accommodate demographic change
• Ensure that not only the provision of housing on the basis of need continues but that its operation is fully protected and enforced by the relevant authorities at the point of delivery so that society’s needs, not paramilitary intimidation, determines our current and future housing provision
• The introduction of rent caps and tenants-rights legislation to end the exploitation by rack-renting landlords.