Debate contribution: Homelessness Awareness Week 2024

Debate contribution by Mr Gerry Carroll on 2 December 2024.

MLA

Mr Gerry Carroll

Party at the time

People Before Profit Alliance

Date

2 December 2024

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Homelessness Awareness Week 2024

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4686560

Read the official Assembly record

Text

The root causes of homelessness are often multifaceted. Many who experience homelessness are also affected by addiction, relationship breakdown, poverty, disability and ill health, insecure work or unemployment. In my constituency of West Belfast, 4,100 households are on the social housing waiting list, and over 3,000 of those are homeless. Those figures are unacceptable. The forces that drive our homelessness crisis are clear. Year after year, we refuse or fail to build enough social homes for the ever-increasing number of people who need them, which was over 88,000 at the last count. Hoping and waiting for in-year budget allocations to meet social housing building needs is not a sustainable or fair way of delivering social homes. The Communities Minister recently announced that an extra £24 million, allocated during the October monitoring round, would enable the construction of up to 800 new social homes, bringing the total to just 1,400 for the year, yet £20 million that was allocated in June was enough to build only 200 social homes. The sums do not add up. At that rate, it will take decades to clear the backlog in our waiting lists. Instead of providing homes where families can put down permanent roots, the Executive are allowing the problem to grow. Last year alone, £34 million was spent on temporary accommodation, much of which ended up in the pockets of private landlords and companies. That is totally unacceptable. To rely on the private market to solve our homelessness crisis is to pursue a fool's errand. It is a disgrace that people profiteer from the homelessness crisis and that Executive parties facilitate that profiteering. In 1981, two out of every five households here lived in a Housing Executive home; today, shockingly, that number is just one in 10. During the debate, we should remember that homelessness is the direct result of political choices. The failure to invest in building enough social homes for the people who need them is a political choice. Cuts to the discretionary housing payment budget, resulting in more people falling into arrears and facing homelessness, is a political choice. Historical underinvestment in vital homelessness support services delivered by the community and voluntary sector and the Supporting People programme is a political choice. Those in power tell us that ending homelessness is complicated, but it is definitely not complicated. The solutions are obvious to anyone who walks through the city centre or down the high street past buildings and homes that have been lying empty for years. The solutions are obvious to anyone whose landlord has issued an extortionate rent increase. Relying on the private market to solve our homelessness crisis is a fool's errand. The solutions are obvious to anyone who has been evicted from their home for no good reason and has nowhere else to go. We need to keep people in their homes by introducing a no-fault eviction ban and rent controls that are linked to income. We need to make use of the UK's new definition of debt to allow the Housing Executive to invest in building the new social homes that are so desperately needed and building them where they are needed. We need to act to quickly transform some of the 22,500 vacant homes across the North into social homes. We need to implement a housing first programme to tackle chronic homelessness: a programme that treats housing as a fundamental human right. Everyone, regardless of their income or where they are from, deserves a decent, affordable and secure place to live. The people of the North know what needs to be done to end homelessness, and it is up to the Executive parties to do it. That is why I am bringing forward a Member's Bill called the people's housing Bill, which will aim to tackle some of the root causes of the housing crisis that has ruined people's lives and torn families apart for too long. I hope that Members will support that Bill.

660 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 11:36 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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