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The Department for Social Development released its Housing Strategy "Facing the Future" for consultation in October 2012. With little fanfare, the Department has now published an Action Plan to deliver this strategy. The plan sets out a number of objectives and actions for the next four years (to 2017) and includes the key themes originally proposed in the consultation paper:
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.
