The Department for Communities has confirmed that the social housing waiting list in Northern Ireland has now passed 50,000.
The figure is an indicator of the housing crisis unfolding over the whole of the UK, with waiting lists in Northern Ireland having risen by more than 30% over the last ten years.
The urgency of need within the waiting list has also worsened. The amount of applicants listed under FDA (Full Duty Applicants) has also increased significantly over the last decade. Those with FDA status are effectively homeless, with over 33,000 FDA applicants on waiting lists in Northern Ireland, a figure that has more than doubled since 2016. FDA status however does not indicate strictly rough sleeping, but that they are housed in temporary, unstable living situations awaiting intervention from the NI Housing Executive.
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The concerning figures come a year after Gordon Lyons, the Communities Minister, announced that less public funding will be made available for social housing development, a move he claimed would achieve “better value and more social homes for those who need them” but drew widespread criticism from developers and associations. The changes saw public funding that would finance the building of a new social home drop from an average of 54% to 46% on the 1st December 2025.
The Northern Ireland Housing Executive has a target in place for construction to begin on 5,850 social houses in the three years building up to 2027, a target that seems unlikely to be met. Lyons has said he is working proactively to make social housing cheaper and easier to build, and is exploring deploying public land to build on in a bid to increase delivery.
Ciarán Fox, director of the Royal Society of Ulster Architects (RSUA), speaking to the BBC criticised the lack of a homelessness action plan from the NI Housing Executive, which he says the Executive agreed to deliver by March 2025.
“The minister for communities has instigated some important reviews that hopefully will result in the removal of some barriers to the delivery of social housing,” he said.
“However, this is a challenge that must be addressed in a co-ordinated way across government.
“There is great potential to provide additional homes and address dereliction through the re-use of existing buildings. However, government policy must incentivise this.”
Capitalising on existing buildings is an idea that has been brought forward by other organisations across the UK, with CASE calling for the use of commercial and non-residential buildings, and the Bevan Foundation calling for a focus on empty homes being brought back into use.
The situation in Ireland is not isolated, with waiting lists in England amounting to over 1.3M households as housebuilding in vital areas such as London continue to experience delays. Although more homes are desperately needed, there is a deeper, urgent need for more affordable homes, as rising rents and stagnating wages are seeing more and more working people displaced from the private sector and seeking housing from local authorities, increasing the expensive use of temporary accommodation.
