Lyons says he is looking at ‘innovative measures’ to boost delivery and pledges to increase starts this year
Gordon Lyons said he will propose to fellow ministers measures to allow more public land to be used for housing, in a bid to meet the Northern Ireland Executive’s (NIE) housing targets.
Lyons, communities minister at the NIE, told the BBC’s the Nolan Show that 1,750 social homes would be started this year. This would be an increase on the previous year’s figure of 1,504 but still lower than the executive’s annual target of 2,300 homes.
Lyons said that he will “get as much money as he can” to build homes but he also needs to look at what he can do to make money go further, hence the decision in October to cut social housing grant for housing associations from 54% of the total development cost to 46%.
“If we can get more money from the executive, I’ll do everything that I can to get that”, he said. “But in the absence of that, I need to look at new ways of doing things. That’s why I have reduced the amount that a charging association will get per unit, because I want to stretch that money further. I want them to do more so that we can build more.”
“Secondly, I’m also bringing proposals to the executive to say to them, ‘if you cannot give me cash to build more homes, give me land’, because we have huge amounts of land within the public sector, and I’m saying to them, give me land so that I can build more.”
Lyons also said the housing executive is using reserves to buy 600 more homes to ease temporary accommodation pressures along with introducing intermediate rent for lower income households in addition to previously securing extra funding from the executive to increase social housing delivery.
Lyons said: “We’re doing what we can with what we have. At the start of this year, we thought we’d be in the position to build 1,000 social homes but I lobbied and secured extra funding and now we’re only just short of our target.”
Lyons was responding to on-air to criticism from Sean Harkin, a councillor for hard-left political party People Before Profit. Harkin said Lyons does not “have a serious plan” to tackle Northern Ireland’s housing crisis and should be sacked.
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