Unfinished business
Writing in agendaNi, People Before Profit MLA Gerry Carroll discusses the battle for social housing in Northern Ireland.
The Housing Executive was once the envy of these islands. A single, unified, publicly accountable body with the scale and the mandate to house people who needed it. PwC, not exactly a socialist think tank, described it as one of the North’s genuine success stories, transforming our housing stock from one of the worst in western Europe to one of the best. This took political will, public investment and a recognition that housing is a basic human right, rather than a commodity.
What we are witnessing now is the systematic dismantling of that legacy, and we should be clear-sighted about the contributing factors.
In 1975, the Housing Executive built over 5,000 new homes. By the mid-1990s, that had fallen to 1,360. Today it is zero. The promise was that housing associations would fill the gap but they have not and they cannot. The Housing Executive set a new build target of 2,300 social homes per year, already revised down from 3,000. In 2024/25, housing associations built just 1,410. Meanwhile, the number of households with homelessness status has more than doubled over the past decade, rising from 13,644 to 32,159, a 136 per cent increase. Behind each of these statistics is a family suffering.
Against this backdrop, the Minister for Communities has decided to strip state funding from housing associations: the only providers of social housing in Northern Ireland. This is a regressive, indefensible decision. Housing associations will now be forced to seek more private finance, delay projects or scrap them entirely.
When private finance gets involved in what ought to be a public good, the priorities of investors crowd out the needs of tenants. Senior management of a public body like the Housing Executive are accountable to a democratically elected minister, who answers to the electorate.
“When private finance gets involved in what ought to be a public good, the priorities of investors crowd out the needs of tenants”
Gerry Carroll MLA, People Before Profit
Senior management of financialised housing associations are increasingly accountable to capital markets. It should be obvious which system produces fairer outcomes. Apparently, it is not obvious enough to everyone in Stormont.
The condition of much of the Housing Executive’s existing stock is a sorry sight. A maintenance backlog growing by the day. Thousands of families live in homes that are damp, mouldy, or inaccessible. In west Belfast in 2023/24, Housing Executive tenants submitted 1,379 repair requests for damp and mould in a single year. The Housing Executive completed 141 repairs and just one installation of cavity wall insulation. That is a 10 per cent response rate. That figure should shame every person with responsibility for housing policy in this place.
Nye Bevan, the socialist Labour MP who founded the NHS, held the housing and health ministerial portfolios simultaneously because there was a clear-eyed recognition in the 1940s that housing and health are inseparable. That recognition has long since been abandoned. Forcing people to live in damp, cold, mouldy homes is a political choice, and its consequences are deadly. Cosmetic repairs without meaningful capital investment change nothing.
That is why I brought forward a motion in the Assembly calling on the Communities Minister to introduce Awaab’s Law (or equivalent legislation) in the North. Social tenants must have the legal power to take their landlord to court when damp, mould, and disrepair go unaddressed. The law already exists in England and there is no excuse for its absence here.
The Housing Executive’s stock is also being hollowed out from above. In 1981, two in five people in Northern Ireland lived in a Housing Executive home. By 2021, it was one in 10. The House Sales Scheme is a major reason why. Homes sold under the scheme have not stayed with the families who needed them. By 2019, around a quarter had ended up in the hands of private landlords. We do not have more up-to-date figures, but it is a safe bet it is higher.
The Housing Executive is losing its best homes to the private rented sector while working class families wait years on a list that only grows longer. While selling off desperately needed stock, it compounds the injustice through a succession policy that evicts grieving tenants from homes they have lived in for decades.
The solution to the housing crisis will not be found in further financialisation, more private borrowing or pushing people into an under-regulated, wildly unaffordable private rented sector, where rents have risen by an extortionate 51 per cent in the past five years. That is a complete dead end. But restoring the Housing Executive’s capacity must also prompt harder questions about what kind of housing we need and for whom.
Our population is ageing, and people with chronic conditions are living longer. We need accessible homes designed around people’s actual lives. We need much more housing for single people, who are almost invisible in current policy. We need adequate refuge provision for women fleeing domestic violence. Thirty women have been murdered in the North since 2020. That epidemic of gender-based violence and the housing crisis are not separate issues.
The Housing Executive’s founding was a hard-won victory, a direct legacy of the Civil Rights Movement’s demand for fair and accountable public housing. It was born out of resistance to sectarian allocation, political neglect, and slum conditions. Defending it today is not nostalgia. It is defending the principle that everyone, regardless of income, background, or circumstance, deserves a decent and secure home.
That principle is under sustained attack. The response has to be equally sustained in the Assembly, on the streets and in every community where families are living with the human cost of a housing system that is clearly unfit for purpose.
