You are viewing 1 of your 1 free articles
NIHE could become like housing association, says top official
Northern Ireland’s housing authority could be reformed to become similar to a housing association, one of the country’s top civil servants has said.
Leo O’Reilly, permanent secretary of Northern Ireland’s Department for Communities (DfC), said the Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE) currently faces a “significant problem” in trying to maintain its 86,500-home stock.
“Certainly, direction of travel there, we believe has to be in terms of creating a new social enterprise-type organisation that would effectively allow the Housing Executive, along with housing associations, to be able to take the opportunity to borrow funds on the private sector markets in a way that does not impact on the public sector balance sheet,” Mr O’Reilly said.
He was speaking at the Northern Ireland Federation of Housing Associations’ annual conference in Limavady today.
READ MORE
Answering a question after his talk, Mr O’Reilly suggested the NIHE could be made “similar to a registered housing association”, with its function as the statutory body for homelessness and allocations in Northern Ireland transferred to a new organisation or the DfC.
The NIHE is currently restricted from accessing private finance, while its rents have been frozen for several years.
Mr O’Reilly said around £7bn of investment is needed in the body’s existing stock over the next 20 years, but that “there is not yet any viable plan in place to deliver that”.
He added that if the NIHE needs to divert more of its spending into maintaining its homes there could be less money available for housing associations to build new social housing.
The DfC has established a programme to consider the future of the NIHE, but there are currently no ministers in the region to make decisions needed for change.
Ahead of the breakdown of Stormont, there have been several abortive attempts to break up the NIHE and transfer its stock to housing associations.
The NIHE revealed last year that it planned to start building homes again for the first time in 15 years.
