Debate contribution: Housing: Disrepair, Damp and Mould

Debate contribution by Mr Mark Durkan on 24 February 2026.

MLA

Mr Mark Durkan

Party at the time

Social Democratic and Labour Party

Date

24 February 2026

Type

Debate contribution

Business

Private Members' Business

Heading

Housing: Disrepair, Damp and Mould

Assembly identifier

Official Report component 5404713

Read the official Assembly record

Text

Thanks, Mr Deputy Speaker. The importance of a warm, safe home cannot be overstated. We often speak about home as a place of comfort and warmth, especially during these colder winter months, but, for many families in 2026, the conditions of the place in which they live are nothing short of Dickensian. People are going to sleep in and waking up in cold, damp bedrooms, wiping black mould from walls and fearing what damage and sickness the colder temperatures will bring. The cost-of-living crisis has compounded that fear: the fear of rising bills and of having to choose whether to eat or heat. The issue is not confined to social housing, as the Member who has just spoken said; it persists across the private rented sector, and the picture for temporary accommodation, which I will come to later, is even worse. We are debating this today because of a tragedy: a child's death. That tragedy has forced Governments across the UK to confront the reality of damp, mould and disrepair. While other jurisdictions are moving to prevent a repeat of such a tragedy by introducing legal protections that compel landlords to act within clear, enforceable time frames, this Minister continues to stall and sidestep. There has been no urgency nor any indication of a political will to act. At a time when families are living in unsafe conditions, that reluctance is indefensible. Maybe the Minister will explain it, but repeatedly dismissing questions or recycling the same answers in the face of a mounting public health issue speaks to a failure to grasp the seriousness of what tenants are enduring. The Communities Minister continues to refer my Assembly questions on the matter — there have been quite a few — to a response that he gave me in March 2024, which was two years ago. Meanwhile, in the last 12 months alone, almost 14,500 reports of damp have been made to the Housing Executive. That does not include housing associations or private tenancies, where conditions are often worse, meaning that the true picture is undoubtedly much worse. In my constituency, I have been in and have seen homes that are riddled with damp. Westway in Creggan comes to mind, where older Housing Executive stock has been left to decay because insulation works have been delayed time and again. Tenants pay through the roof to heat homes that simply cannot retain warmth. Heat seeps through uninsulated walls and poorly fitted windows. Many of those residents suffer from persistent coughs, asthma and COPD. That cannot be a coincidence. I will turn specifically to temporary accommodation, because that is where the focus of our amendment lies. I believe that the amendment complements the motion, and I commend the proposer for bringing the motion to the House. We feel that urgent attention is required on temporary accommodation. I have witnessed at first hand examples of shocking damp and mould across temporary accommodation provision in my constituency. One deeply distressing case involved a young mother and her baby who had been homeless. They came to my office for help after the child was hospitalised with multiple serious chest infections — something that the baby had never suffered from before. I was horrified when I saw what they were living in. There was black mould spread across the walls, clothes and toys, and even the baby's pram was destroyed by mould. Here is the most disturbing part: I recognised that property because, a few months earlier, I had complained to the Housing Executive about it on behalf of a previous tenant. That individual was moved out of the property, but the property was not fixed, and no one was held accountable. Instead, another vulnerable family was simply moved in. That is systemic failure. Following a series of Assembly questions, I have learned that single-let temporary accommodation used by the Housing Executive is not subject to routine ongoing inspection beyond its initial acquisition. I was advised that an inspection exercise on a small number of properties was conducted in my constituency, with repeat exercises planned, but, to my knowledge, that was simply to ensure that the premises were being occupied, not to address the serious concerns about the quality of those premises. Maintenance responsibility rests with private providers, and the Housing Executive acts as an intermediary when problems are reported. Therefore, those responsible for monitoring the situation are also responsible for ensuring that repairs are conducted; they are essentially marking their own homework. As we all know, temporary accommodation houses some of the most vulnerable people, including families experiencing homelessness, individuals fleeing domestic abuse and people at their lowest ebb. If any accommodation should meet the highest standards, it is that. Our amendment seeks to do a number of things. First, it supports, as the motion does, legislation similar to Awaab's law, with strict time frames for addressing damp and mould across the social and private rented sectors. Secondly, it explicitly includes temporary accommodation in that protection and, critically, places a clear statutory duty on the Housing Executive to regularly inspect and enforce those minimum standards. There currently are none. This is not about blaming the Housing Executive but about recognising that, when public money is used to place vulnerable people in accommodation, there must be proactive oversight rather than reactive complaint handling. You are sometimes lucky to get even that.

The DUP amendment touches on the issue of borrowing powers and long-term standards. It does not really address or provide the urgency that is required to prevent a child sleeping in a damp room tonight or tomorrow. It is a big issue that is worthy of debate, but it is a debate for another day. The amendment also dilutes the call for legislation or a legislative underpinning of minimum standards, the need for which has been recognised by other Parliaments in the UK. We know that damp, cold homes carry serious health risks and financial implications. One in four people who died here in 2022 were in fuel poverty. That should shame every one of us into action in the immediate and the long term. In the long term, we need to look at resources and adequately funding existing and, hopefully, future measures. We in the SDLP have long championed a comprehensive, green and energy-efficient housing strategy. We believe in retrofitting, proper targets, accountability and a just transition that does not leave low-income families behind. Undoubtedly, we need investment in new homes — and we support the Minister in any bid to get that — but we also need to fix what we have. The affordable warmth scheme, which was intended to be our front-line defence against fuel poverty, remains underfunded and overwhelmed. In 2023-24, it received over 11,500 applications, yet only 24% of those applicants received support. The 2019 cavity wall action plan found that 63% of Housing Executive properties were not compliant with current standards. Only 9% were deemed to have sufficient cavity wall insulation. In four years, just 203 of those homes were supported. None of them was in Derry and Strabane, which is an area with some of the highest numbers of reports of damp. It is certainly the area in which there is the highest incidence of deprivation. Today, we are dealing with a living reality that demands urgency. Every cold home, every child who lives with damp and the sickness that comes with it, every pensioner who is afraid to turn on the heating, and every homeless family who is placed in substandard temporary accommodation represents serious policy failures. We need to do better. My party's amendment seeks to close a dangerous oversight gap. It protects the most vulnerable, ensuring that temporary accommodation meets the same safety standards as any other home. Let us not continue to compound the suffering of people who are already in crisis by dumping them in damp hovels.

1,312 words. Text as published by the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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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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