Council criticises plans to split NIHE
Northern Ireland’s largest council has criticised the social development minister’s handling of plans to disband the country’s housing executive.
Belfast Council has written to Nelson McCausland voicing support of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive’s work in the same week the troubled 90,000-home landlord was rocked by another damning government report about its management of repairs contracts.
Belfast fears that a radical plan to split up the NIHE will ‘pave the way for the re-politicisation of the allocation of housing’.
The council said the Department for Social Development needs to ensure that under the plans to break up the landlord tabled by Mr McCausland in January, housing can still be allocated by need. It did accept that the organisation needs structural reform.
The NIHE was set up in 1971 in part to tackle sectarian inequality in housing allocations in Northern Ireland.
Nichola Mallon, a Social Democratic and Labour Party councillor at Belfast Council, said: ‘There are concerns about the way that the minister is conducting the reforms. We are concerned about the amount of information that he’s released and we’ve written to him to say that any reform must be enshrined in fairness and equality.’
On Wednesday, the public accounts committee published a report criticising the NIHE’s contract management stating it had ‘failed in its duties to manage and be accountable for services it provided’.
It also criticised the DSD for ignoring warnings from the comptroller general that there were shortcomings in contract performance as long ago as 2004.
Michaela Boyle, chair of the committee, said management and oversight of the repairs and maintenance service at the NIHE had been ‘abjectly poor’, adding it raised questions about the ‘competence of management’ over many years.
The NIHE declined to comment on the report.
The latest blow to the NIHE’s reputation came as it emerged the landlord has already separated its landlord and strategic budgets ahead of an expected split.
A spokesperson for the NIHE said the move ‘made sense’ in terms of the organisation’s financial planning, and that staff restructuring was taking place as a result. New management positions are likely to be advertised in the summer.
