Close to £100 million will be taken out of the construction sector as budget cuts are leading to a dramatic drop in the number of social housing new builds, the head of the Housing Executive has warned.
Construction of approximately 400 homes will begin this financial year, far below the target of 2,000 as the budget for social housing has dropped year on year from £161m to £116m.
The funding squeeze will also affect the housing executive’s statutory duty to tackle homelessness, including providing temporary accommodation, while the elderly and disabled could suffer as the budget to help people with their heating costs is cut nearly in half to just over £7m, prompting a warning lives may be put at risk.
It will be “projected drop in social housing output of its kind in a generation at a time when housing need is at its most acute,” the organisation said in a response to the Department for the Communities budget.
“More households will therefore be waiting longer for permanent housing, and many will have to remain in expensive temporary accommodation.”
Funding to tackle homelessness, including providing temporary accommodation, has increased dramatically in recent years, from £12.1m to over £33m, though it will be reduced this year by just under £3m.
However, the housing executive estimates approximately £44m is needed this financial year in the face of a sharp rise in those seeking accommodation, many of them families with children. Placements have increased from 4,527 annually to 11,368 in just five years,
Based on projections, it has warned it will not be able to “discharge its core statutory...duty of providing accommodation to the homeless presenters”.
Grainia Long, housing executive chief executive, said the cuts to the budget for social housing will have a “significant impact” on the construction industry.
“It will take somewhere between £80 and £90 million out of the construction industry,” Ms Long told BBC NI.
She added: “That will have a really significant impact on our economy and this is not something that is coming down the road, this is happening right now.”
The drop in new builds will be felt “very locally” because construction is spread across the north.
“The kind of questions I’m going to have to take in the next few months will be do we close services, and we will have to close services provided by voluntary community sector organisations to people who are homeless,” she added.
“We are looking currently at our own out-of-hours service that will have a significant impact so we may be in a position whereby we have to reduce or close that service.
“I think this needs to be understood as not just a problem for the Housing Executive and those on the waiting list and those who need homelessness services, but this will have a really dramatic impact on the economy and our wider society and most importantly on those in need.”
The cuts will have “dire consequences” for families across the north, said SDLP MLA Daniel McCrossan, the party’s communities spokesperson.
Mr McCrossan said: “”At a time when there are over 46,000 applicants across the north on social housing waiting lists it is completely unacceptable that we are now facing a situation where the housing executive will once again miss their house building targets.
“Families already face waits of years to get a home and even if these targets were met it would nowhere near to meeting the demand for housing.”
The funding shortfall will have far-reaching implications for homeless people and “those who struggle to heat their homes”, the West Tyrone MLA said.
“These are vulnerable people who cannot do without this support. Removing it will put people’s health and potentially even their lives at risk.”
