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Carmel Ferguson, solicitor and member of Housing Rights Service's Legal Team investigates how a recent Upper Tribunal hearing will impact locally. This widely reported case upheld a local authority's decision not to grant housing benefit to a homeless applicant. Could this set a worrying precedent that will impact on people in Northern Ireland?
Housing Rights Service believes that the under-occupancy sanction has the potential to cause real hardship and distress to many claimants and their families. We are worried the measure will have a disproportionate impact in Northern Ireland given the existing composition of the housing stock and high levels of under-occupation in social housing. In our opinion, the policy will do nothing to ease local housing pressures because the greatest demand is currently for smaller properties -precisely those that the ‘spare bedroom tax’ will force social tenants to try to move to.
Housing Rights Service has responded to the DSD consultation exercise - 'Facing the Future: A Housing Strategy for Northern Ireland'. The strategy is intended to cover a five year period from 2012-2017.
Our response examines the five themes contained in the consultation paper, namely:
Ensuring access to decent, affordable, sustainable homes across all tenures
Meeting housing needs and supporting the most vulnerable
Housing and welfare reform
Driving regeneration and sustaining communities through housing, and
Housing Rights Service has released the findings of a ground breaking research study into how the private rented sector can provide a long-term and sustainable housing solution for homeless people with multiple and complex needs. Although the study shows that no single model of housing and support is likely to be appropriate for all chronically homeless people, it nevertheless finds that the use of rented accommodation in ‘Housing First’ or ‘Housing Led’ models of housing support could provide a solution if adequate safeguards are put in place.
