Minority Groups

Faith, an adviser with our Community Housing Advice Partnership, recently helped to have a young mother’s housing benefit payments reinstated.  The Community Housing Advice Partnership offers a support service to partner agencies who work in the voluntary sector and need expert advice to deal with complex housing cases.

The Housing Executive’s latest Community Cohesion Strategy was launched at the new Girdwood Community Hub on Friday 19 February 2016.

The strategy covers the period from 2015-2020 and aims to deliver on NIHE’s vision for housing; “…in which housing plays its part in creating a peaceful, inclusive, prosperous and fair society”.

From February 2016 landlords in England face financial penalties and prosecution if they rent to someone who does not have a legal right to be in the UK.  The roll out of the "right to rent checks", introduced by the Immigration Act 2014, has not yet reached Northern Ireland and local landlords can continue to do business as usual.

The Joint Council for the Welfare of Immigrants has released a report on its assessment of the new requirement for landlords to establish whether tenants have a “right to rent” in the UK before granting a tenancy. The report is highly critical of the pilot scheme; JCVI’s evaluation uncovered a number of worrying direct and indirect impacts of these checks on both tenants and landlords.