Debate contribution: Social and Affordable Housing: East Belfast

Debate contribution by Mr Matthew O'Toole on 3 June 2025.

MLA

Mr Matthew O'Toole

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

3 June 2025

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Adjournment

Heading

Social and Affordable Housing: East Belfast

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 4986166

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I agree with lots of what has been said in the debate. As a constituency MLA who works in the south inner city, which is an area with significant social housing need and demand, I, like other MLAs, regularly deal with housing pressures and my office works hard with the Housing Executive and housing associations to try to address that real and acute need. Access to housing is a human right but also a significant challenge. It is something that the Executive need to deal with via the housing supply strategy, which we hope will come forward at some point soon — I will touch on what the Minister said yesterday — and other means that I will talk about in broader terms. The Adjournment topic relates specifically to East Belfast but we share in broad terms a Housing Executive area. I am in East Belfast now; I am in East Belfast all the time. East Belfast is a wonderful constituency. Its working class communities face many of the same issues that exist in the south of the city. Joanne Bunting talked about the relatively low number of social housing starts in the east of the city. South Belfast is not too far ahead of you, as you referenced in your statistics, and that has been a challenge in particular areas. I welcome the developments that have happened. There have been some in my constituency along McClure Street in the lower Ormeau. New homes in that development have been occupied in the past year, and it is an example of a positive and proactive development that is addressing need. Clearly, there is a range of issues that we need to deal with. I agree with those Members who said that we need to make progress on the reclassification of the Housing Executive. The creation of the Housing Executive is something that my party, and, in a sense, the historic civil rights movement, was involved in setting up. We are proud of that and want to see the Housing Executive revitalised so that it champions and is at the forefront of social housing. That way, rather than just managing social housing allocation, the points system and area planning, it can build social homes and not just leave that to housing associations. Having said that, housing associations do an important job. One thing that I will say to the Minister is that, as Chair of the Finance Committee, and, indeed, as a Committee member before that, I have been pretty repetitive about unused financial transactions capital (FTC), which is a type of spending. I have always said that we would be a constructive Opposition, and I will acknowledge when Departments and Ministers actually try to make use of FTC. The Minister's Department has done a bit of that and has been responsible for pushing in that regard. That is to be welcomed. It would be remiss of me if I were not to use the opportunity of an Adjournment debate that is about a specific constituency challenge to talk about the broader challenge that has come up in the past couple of days. It came up in the debate on the Main Estimates, and we talked about it yesterday when the Minister brought his statement on his departmental budget to the House. We can all come here and talk about the issues and the discrete things that need to happen in particular constituencies, and we can talk about the particular levers, but the Executive are already falling way short of their plans to deliver social homes. The Programme for Government is quite clear — to be fair, the Minister acknowledged this and was at least upfront about it — about the fact that there would be just under 6,000 new social housing starts. The number was unusually and admirably specific, and, because of that, we can already see that the Executive are short of that target. There are a few cricket fans in the Chamber, so, to use a cricketing analogy, our run rate is nowhere near where it needs to be to get us to 6,000 by 2027. If we are delivering 1,000 homes this year, that leaves barely a year and a half to deliver another 4,500 to 5,000. If I am wrong, the Minister can correct those statistics. Why are we in that situation? Clearly, part of it is the budget shortfall, but there are other challenges. I am afraid that we heard some of that from the Finance Minister earlier, who said that we should be grateful. When he was challenged on the lack of delivery of social housing, he effectively said that we should be grateful that 1,000 homes are being built. I am afraid that it does not work like that, with the greatest of respect. If the Southern Housing Minister were to stand up in Dáil Éireann and say, "You should be grateful for the fact that we missed the housing target", one can imagine what the Sinn Féin representative would say in response to that, with all due respect. It would not be, "Yes, we are grateful".

Members are speaking to me from a sedentary position. I know that this is an Adjournment debate, but that is true. That is a fact. South of the border, missing targets like that, with the Minister saying that we should be grateful, would not simply be waved off as acceptable. It should not be acceptable north of the border. The Finance Minister also failed to engage seriously on the question of water, and waste water infrastructure is at the heart of so many of the fundamental challenges that we face. We had Question Time with the Environment Minister earlier, and given the fact that Lough Neagh is becoming an open-air sewer, the crisis in our water system is a fundamental challenge to our environment. We cannot get housing starts, and the fact that connections are so far behind is a major drawback to economic investment.

I am drawing my arguments towards East Belfast, because as others have said and as I am sure the representatives of East Belfast will admit, the failure to invest in NI Water and the inability to get connections is a fundamental problem. Those things are all connected. Apologies, Mr Deputy Speaker, if I strayed into the political and went outside the normally collegiate tone of an Adjournment debate. We are having this debate very early on a Tuesday afternoon, so people will forgive me for getting a little bit too political, given that we are still well in the middle of what is a working day in most people's daily life. Those things are all connected in East Belfast, South Belfast and across the North, so let us not play the game of simply pretending that there is nothing that we can do to deliver the social housing targets that people were promised just a few short weeks ago. The Communities Minister is here, and I hope that he will be able to provide us with an update on the housing supply strategy and Housing Executive reclassification, but he, along with others, including the Finance Minister, needs to account for the failure to deliver targets. I hope that the Finance Minister thinks better of simply asking people in the North to accept something that his party would never ask people in the South to accept.

1,233 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 12:47 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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