No gray areas

Politics runs through Belfast like a stick of rock, on the sides of houses and walls. A red, white and black mural commemorating the 1972 Springhill massacre joins hundreds of others on the peace walls, and in the landscape, with a 30-foot tall white mural that screams ‘STOP TORY CUTS’ from the dormant Cavehill volcano overlooking the city.

But today Inside Housing is outside a formidable concrete 1980s office block. It’s outwardly less interesting than the rest of the landscape, but it’s centre-stage for housing. It’s the headquarters of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE), and we’re here to meet Paddy Gray, professor of housing at Ulster university, former president of the Chartered Insitute of Housing (CIH). The Derry Journal newspaper describes Professor Gray as ‘arguably the north’s foremost authority when it comes to housing’. Indeed, it’s almost impossible to find an article written on housing in the region without finding a quote from the housing professor included.

And, as we discover when Professor Gray ambles up in grey suit and a pink shirt, wielding a golf umbrella in the few hours he has off between lectures, it’s also impossible to stand on the street anywhere near NIHE’s headquarters without having someone approach to wave or say hello every few seconds: he knows everyone, and they know him.

A woman exits and shouts. ‘Don’t believe a word he tells you!’ before winking and slapping him playfully on the arm.

And all those who Inside Housing speaks to only have good things to say. ‘Paddy has been and continues to be an enormous asset to housing in Northern Ireland – as an educator, an influencer and a leader of the profession,’ says Grainia Long, outgoing chief executive of CIH.

Fra McCann, Sinn Fein MP for West Belfast calls him ‘one of those voices which is sought by government and agencies on housing’. He continues to point out the professor ‘has passed this experience on to several generations of people who have been fortunate to be part of his courses and whilst we might have some differences on the future direction on some housing issues, I have always found him professional and easy to work with and respect his advice and opinion.’

“My mother gave us a big push for education, and to go down an anti-sectarian route”

We’ve come to meet the professor to find out what he thinks about the changes at NIHE and the picture for housing in Northern Ireland. It’s certainly a challenging time.

NIHE, where Professor Gray started his career in 1981 and worked for six years before moving to academia, was set up in 1971 to tackle inconsistent allocations systems for social housing in Northern Ireland. In 2013, the then social development minister Nelson McCausland announced in a letter that the Housing Executive was to be broken up. The future of the organisation had to consider fiscal and borrowing requirements, the building and developments needs of Northern Ireland, and the unique and contentious political dynamics of Northern Ireland, that have for decades spilled into housing construction and allocations. And, at the end of 2014, it is still not clear exactly what will happen to the 90,000 homes owned and managed by the landlord, and how its other responsibilities will be broken up.

Interesting times

So who better to ask about the future of housing in Northern Ireland at this turning point, than Professor Gray?

The professor started to accrue housing credentials early in his life, it emerges as we talk over a glass of Rioja in a a bijou hotel bar down the road from the NIHE headquarters.

He grew up in Dairies Willows, a village of prefabricated bungalows in a single parent family with his four brothers. ‘My mother gave us a big push for education,’ he explains. ‘And to go down an anti-sectarian route: to meet people from different sides, when you could have been caught up in something else.‘ (Professor Gray has just finished recording a BBC Radio Ulster documentary on the history of the estate, ‘Tin Town Kids’.)

After completing a bachelor’s degree in social studies at the University of Ulster, Professor Gray was elected the student union president, and teaches there still, though he self-deprecatingly points out it was a polytechnic at the time. ‘I was president during the hunger strikes,’ Professor Gray says, recalling the political protests of 1981. ’We usually expected 30 people to come to our annual general meeting. At our first meeting, 1,400 people turned up. We had to hire out the great hall. So, you can imagine, it was all about who to support in the hunger strikes. It was a difficult year, but it was a great year, meeting so many different people, and great for the profile. I was threatened by both sides. So it was good that way,‘ he jokes.

With such a major role in the student union, at such a political time, why not naturally fall into politics rather than housing and then in turn the rather more cerebral academia? ‘I couldn’t affiliate with any party in Northern Ireland at the time, I’m just not into sectarian politics. If I had been in England, I would have, definitely.’

Inspiration

Instead, Professor Gray took inspiration from the poor housing conditions of the students he had seen as student president, and applied for a job at the NIHE as a housing officer. He explains: ‘The housing conditions at the time weren’t very good in the private sector. Whereas the Housing Executive was quite a vibrant organisation and recruiting, so I kind of fell into it. My first job was on a large loyalist estate in north Belfast so they called me Peter,’ Professor Gray jokes. ‘See, Gray’s fine, but Paddy didn’t go down too well.’ He describes this first job as both ‘a difficult time’ and ‘the best time I ever had’. The Rathcoole estate where he worked was the largest housing estate in western Europe at the time, with 5,000 homes. ‘I still take the students down to see it,’ the professor adds.

As well as training a large number of Northern Ireland’s future housing professionals in his 27-year academic career, Professor Gray has worked to bridge the divide between housing practice and academia, campaigning for social housing with the CIH, the NIHE and other housing professionals, alongside his research and teaching commitments.

“There’s so many people that want to do so much and have a genuine passion for helping people and that’s the one thing that I would take away from the housing sector”

So, back to the present and the fate of the NIHE – given its size as the biggest landlord in Northern Ireland, surely one of the biggest questions facing the housing sector here. ‘I think it’s guaranteed they will come out of the public sector. We’re unique in many ways, because the Housing Executive took on a lot of powers that the public sector had in Scotland and Wales, and that was because of the Troubles,’ Professor Gray explains. ‘So in many ways it [the Housing Executive] became a public body and they come under the public sector borrowing requirement, so any money it has to borrow goes against government debt.’

So why is it taking so long to reach a decision on the Housing Executive’s future? ‘As to whether they split up, whether it becomes three, five, seven organisations,’ he adds. ‘The problem with that all is the geography of Northern Ireland. You could [end] up with a Catholic [housing association] and a Protestant one, and you need to be careful where you draw the boundaries. As a strategic organisation, it’s popular despite the recent criticisms and it’s generally accepted by both sides of the community.’ The recent criticism include a £1bn investment black hole, and an £18m maintenance overpayment scandal.

As someone who has worked in housing for 30 years, is a household name to anyone in the sector and region, and appears to be on first name terms with everyone we meet on the street outside NIHE, it seems likely that Professor Gray will have at least some idea of the state of morale inside the building. Mr Gray doesn’t mince his words. ‘Awful. Awful,’ he says.

The other big issue for housing in the region right now is undoubtedly welfare reform. As well as teaching housing, and feeding into housing policy through giving evidence in more than 30 parliamentary committees, and publishing over 200 academic papers, Professor Gray is chair of Derry Citizens’ Advice Bureau so is well aware of how problems with poverty, debt, and health intersect with housing. While Northern Ireland might not yet have rolled out the bedroom tax, certain aspects of welfare reform have hit the country, which has some of the highest poverty rates in the UK, particularly hard. ‘We’re still getting sanctions. Younger people have been forced through the single room rate, forced into sharing. We don’t have the bedroom tax, but we have the other issues where people have had to leave [their property] or move into shared accommodation,’ he points out.

Before we head off into the Belfast drizzle, Professor Gray wants one last word on the people he feels are the underdogs of housing. ‘There’s so many people that want to do so much and have a genuine passion for helping people and that’s the one thing that I would take away from the housing sector, and I tell my students that all the time,’ he says.  ‘The ordinary workers, they don’t get large salaries, and they’re working hard and putting in the extra hours and they’re doing what they can for communities. That’s my unsung hymn and without those people, you’re not going to get anything done at all.’