Housing waiting list in Northern Ireland passes 50,000

The number of households on the social housing waiting list in Northern Ireland has now passed 50,000.

The milestone was confirmed in official figures published by the Department for Communities.

The number of households on the waiting list has risen by more than 30% over the last decade.

The figures illustrate the scale of the crisis in social housing which has seen rising demand alongside limited supply of new houses.

The composition of the households on the waiting list has also undergone a significant change in the past decade.

More than 33,000 of those on the list are classified as "full duty applicants" (FDA) which effectively means they are homeless.

The number with FDA status has more than doubled in the past decade.

FDA status does not mean those people are rough sleeping, instead they are in temporary, unstable situations waiting for the Housing Executive to fulfil its legal duty to rehouse them.

The executive has a programme for government target to start work on 5,850 social houses across a three-year period running up to 2027.

The current rate of building suggests it will be a struggle to meet that target.

Last year Communities Minister Gordon Lyons announced controversial changes to the funding of social housing providers which he said was aimed at trying to do more with a limited budget.

He said that his department are looking at how they can "make social housing easier and cheaper to build".

"At the start of the year, when we don't have the finance in place, it can look as if we are not going to meet our targets, I will do everything we can to make sure that we progress and get that figure up."

Another strategy Lyons said his department are deploying is the use of public sector land to build on, which he said "can be used as part of the subsidy instead of cash, which is a significant part of how much it costs to build a home.

Getting access to public land from other executive departments is something Lyons said is "out of my hands".

"There is still funding that could be made available to help us hit these targets. It is a generational issue, not one that has crept up in the last couple of years," he added.

Lyons said the number of individuals with FDA is "really tough".

"What we need to do is help in anyway we can. More investment in co-ownership, more homes through the affordable rent scheme. There is no one solution to all of these."

Deirdre Canavan from homelessness charity Depaul called for "radical action" to address what she called a deepening crisis.

"We need to see much more if the executive is going to hit its target of beginning building 5,850 new social homes by 2027," she said.

"We also remain greatly concerned over budgets - we are almost in June and still no budget has been agreed by the executive so we are operating services at risk."

She said the current situation - in terms of funding and need - was unsustainable.

Canavan said failure to adequately handle the problem of homelessness will have knock-on impacts for health and social care.

"They (people facing homelessness) would have no other option than to turn to acute emergency and statutory services who are already under pressure. That cannot and should not happen."

Ciarán Fox, director of the Royal Society of Ulster Architects (RSUA), said the executive agreed to produce an action plan by March 2025 and "18 months after we still have no action plan".

"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."

Seamus Leheny, chief executive of the Northern Ireland Federation of Housing Associations, told the BBC's Good Morning Ulster programme that there are "a lot of different factors" that contribute to the rising demand.

"They are social economic but also pressures on the private rental market, it's supply and demand ultimately," he said.

"We are seeing people who are being priced out of the rental market and then having to present themselves as homeless to the Housing Executive."

The way to help with the issue, Leheny said, was to "try and target the waiting list from both ends, there is going to be people that will never get enough points to get a social home, so what we need to do for those people is build affordable housing."

He added that, in the last financial year, "we commenced work on 1,765 units, but when you look at the housing supply strategy we should be building a minimum of 2,200".

Hitting targets on units built will be "extremely difficult", he added.

Sinn Féin MLA Colm Gildernew, who is chairperson of the Stormont communities committee, said the latest figures "reveal a worsening housing crisis".

He added that a scheme to purchase 600 homes for temporary accommodation had not yet delivered one single home.

"The statistics should act as a wake up call to minister Lyons who urgently needs to get to grips with the crisis in housing," he said.

SDLP communities spokesperson Mark H Durkan said: "It has become accepted that every time we see a new set of housing figures the situation around social housing waiting lists, homelessness and the cost of buying and renting a home only gets higher.

"We cannot allow ourselves to become numb to these figures. Behind every single one of them is a family who is struggling to get a roof over their heads."