Debate contribution: Housing: Disrepair, Damp and Mould

Debate contribution by Mr Gerry Carroll on 24 February 2026.

MLA

Mr Gerry Carroll

Party at the time

People Before Profit Alliance

Date

24 February 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Housing: Disrepair, Damp and Mould

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5404695

Read the official Assembly record

Text

I beg to move

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. It is clear that damp and mould is a public health issue that needs to be tackled urgently, which, up to this point, it has not been. I begin my contribution with the testimony of a constituent of mine. Marcus lives on the Shankill Road in West Belfast. He is also a member of the Community Action Tenants Union (CATU). He rents from a private landlord and lives with his partner and his one-year-old daughter, and I quote from him:

"We got confirmation of our success in gaining a tenancy the day my daughter was born. It was like a lifeline to us, and we trusted the real estate agents to provide us with a safe and hospitable home for us and our daughter, so we jumped in to sign yes. Now, I fear they have led us into a deathtrap of a home, which is detrimental to my family's physical and mental well-being."

Marcus and his partner are usually fit and healthy. Since moving into that home, however, they have been plagued throughout the year with severe coughs and chest infections, which get worse in the winter months.

Unfortunately, that is not an isolated case. Their windows are covered in mould, despite attempts to paint over it. When the oil boiler began to leak, the family was without heating for over a week; conveniently. The agent could not get hold of the landlord. The house has next to no ventilation, and the few ventilation bricks are plugged up.

Marcus now constantly leaves windows open, and he buys multiple damp traps for each room in the house every two weeks. The walls are soaked because of structural damage to the house and guttering, and parts of the outside wall are broken and hanging off, which makes it incredibly unsafe for the family to be outside it. Marcus said that, when the issue was raised with his property manager, they replied with questions about how his family ventilated and heated the home, as if they had caused the issues. Again, that is not an isolated case but something that happens across the board. It is abundantly clear to me and many people out there that the Executive have prioritised landlord wealth over people's health. At its core, the debate is about power. It is not just about damp and mould, although it is undeniable that tenants are getting sick and dying because their homes are in such a shocking state of repair. People may ask how many are affected: the truth is that we do not know, because the data and figures are not captured. The debate is about who holds power in our society and who is left to suffer the consequences of the imbalance. The facts are damning. In 2023-24, in my constituency of West Belfast, Housing Executive tenants made 1,379 requests for repairs due to damp and mould. In the same year, the Housing Executive completed just 141 repairs, including a single installation of cavity wall insulation. That is a 10% response rate, and it is the result of a system that pushes tenants and their most basic rights to the bottom, while landlords and the bureaucracy of an increasingly privatised state are at the top. The power imbalance is felt most acutely in the private rented sector, with more than 60% of respondents to the Renters’ Voice survey stating that they delayed reporting a repair for fear of eviction and over half saying that they decided not to report at all. People are living with black mould crawling up their walls, their windows soaked with condensation and their children going back and forth to A&E, but they say nothing because they are terrified of losing the roof over their heads: that is a hostage situation. It is bad enough that people live in mouldy and damp conditions, but they also live in absolute fear. There is also the culture of blame. For too long, landlords and social housing providers have pointed the finger at tenants and their cooking, ventilation and heating habits. We saw it in the most devastating terms after the tragic and entirely preventable death of Awaab Ishak, a two-year-old child who died because of prolonged exposure to mould in his home. When his family reported the problem, the housing association suggested it might be linked to the family's bathing and cooking habits. You may ask what that is about. However, it is something that I have heard before: people who are or are presumed to be from a Muslim background — it is institutional racism — being blamed for their terrible housing conditions. It is what happens when working-class communities, people of colour, migrants and refugees are treated as lesser and their lives and health considered to be expendable. Grenfell showed us the same thing: the people who died in the tower were, overwhelmingly, poor people. Safety warnings were ignored in the face of deliberate corner-cutting, and working-class residents paid the price with their lives. We keep hearing that lessons will be learned, but lessons are meaningless without accountability and structural change. Our housing system is built to enable profit, and the attitude in the private rented sector is, essentially, that tenants should put up or shut up. If they complain, they will be put out because there is no protection from no-fault evictions, unlike elsewhere on these islands. I hope that my private Member’s Bill can change that situation in the coming months. A member of the campaign group Renters’ Voice was hospitalised recently after falling through the crumbling decking at the back of her property, which she had reported to her landlord. When she escalated the complaint to environmental health, she was told that her lease would not be renewed, and she was, in effect, evicted: a 79-year-old woman was made homeless. That is the reality for tenants, and it needs to be heard in the debate today. The environmental health teams in councils are chronically underfunded and do not have the resources to carry out enough inspections to enforce the existing minimal standards. In the social housing sector, the Housing Executive's maintenance and repair work is increasingly contracted out to private companies with minimal oversight. Private landlords and companies — the likes of Mears and Tarasis — rake in record profits from temporary accommodation. They put homeless families into damp and mouldy single lets and tell them that they should be grateful to have a roof over their heads. That is not fair or acceptable. For that reason, I welcome the SDLP amendment, which references the temporary accommodation stock and calls for damp, mould and disrepair to be tackled within strict time frames. I turn to the DUP amendment. I have some questions that, I hope, Members can answer now or in their contributions. How can they guarantee that more borrowing powers will not mean that the Housing Executive will be reclassified from a public body to a mutual or cooperative — in other words, privatised? My party will always oppose and always has opposed any attempt at privatisation, be that full-on privatisation, half privatisation or privatisation with a fancy wrapper. All of those things undermine public accountability for tenants, the public and public services more generally. I ask the DUP Members this: will strict time frames for investigation and carrying out repairs be included in the new Decent Homes Standard review? Meaningful enforcement action is one of the key principles of Awaab's law, so will that be included in the new Decent Homes Standard? If it is not, it will not be worth the paper it was written on. The Decent Homes Standard, of course, applies only to social housing. Minimum energy efficiency standards may help to tackle damp and mould in the private rented sector over time, but that would take far too long to implement in practice. I held a cross-organisational meeting upstairs today. I thank everybody who attended it. Representatives from National Energy Action (NEA) were there. Ahead of the debate, I received an NEA briefing — I think that all Members received it — that stated that 43% of respondents to a poll that it had commissioned said that their home had damp and mould and 39% of respondents were living in fuel poverty, with that figure rising to a shocking 64% for those in social housing. A lot of work needs to be done in the social housing sector as well as in the private rented sector . You cannot tackle damp and mould without tackling cold homes. We urgently need minimum energy efficiency standards in the social and private rented sectors. We lag far behind England, Wales and the South of Ireland in that regard. We need Awaab's law to be introduced here — not in the next mandate but now. Tenants deserve meaningful and enforceable rights, not non-binding guidance and empty words from Executive parties that refuse to act. I encourage Members to support the motion.

1,502 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

Assessment

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Assessed 21 October 2026 at 15:03 UTC by jev-1.13.0 (requested as typesafe/jev) under rubric 2026.10-r9, methodology 1.9.

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