PPR’s input gave an overview of the evolution of NI’s land tenure and housing systems, describing how even today, all land is held from the Crown, with the Crown Estate owning NI’s seabed out to 12 nautical miles (including renewables, telecoms, power cables and pipelines); 65% of the foreshore and riverbed (with interests in aquaculture and coastal interests including commercial ports, recreational harbours, marinas, etc); and rights to deposits of gold and silver (including Mines Royal leases and option agreements).

Following partition in 1921, the north pursued a more limited land reform than the Republic of Ireland; large landowners here were permitted to retain untenanted land, thereby holding onto far more of their estates than in the south. Substantive reforms to land law and strategy have been proposed in recent years, but have yet to be acted on.

DAERA indicates that to this day, farmland is largely passed down within families; analysis of its 2018 equality data indicated that, despite repeal of historic laws, Catholic farmers have yet to regain an equitable footing. Its data shows Catholic farmers much more likely to farm very small farms and to work mainly ‘disadvantaged’ or ‘severely disadvantaged’ land.

Academic research revealed that at the advent of the Housing Executive in 1971, Protestant households were more likely to own their own homes than Catholics; if renters, they were more likely to rent privately, while Catholic households were more likely to be in social housing. Twenty years later, in 1991, home ownership was more widespread (in part because of the Housing Executive’s House Sales (‘right to buy’) scheme), with Protestants still more likely to own their own home; 37% of Catholic households were in social housing as opposed to 29% of Protestant households.

Housing Executive data from end 2022 shows that 36.5% of the households on the social housing waiting list identified as Catholic, with 23% identifying as Protestant. (Another 24.4% were listed as ‘unknown’). Both the Housing Executive and the Department for Communities acknowledge (p. 17) a higher proportion of households from the Catholic community in housing stress. A reported 90% of NI’s social housing remains segregated along religious lines; while social housing need is increasingly common everywhere, in urban areas of Belfast and Derry it is disproportionately concentrated in predominately Catholic areas.

PPR’s submission to the Special Rapporteur highlighted a range of challenges in accessing land to use for housing, including the failure to prioritise social housing and to target resources to meet acute housing need. It also drew attention to a reluctance among housing authorities and practitioners to challenge the status quo around de facto segregation.

PPR’ submission highlighted the impact of residual concentration of land in the hands of a few (alongside a failure to establish a community right to buy as Scotland has done), as well as the failure to use public land to meet housing need (here we gave the example of the long-derelict - except for, now, a strip of greenway - publicly-owned 20+ acre Mackies site in West Belfast). Overall, it described the impact of our largely profit-driven housing system, by recalling a 2015 photomapping exercise by families in housing need which identified large vacant areas of Belfast land that could be used for housing.

Of these, only Glenmona has seen large-scale social housing development. Following years of work by local people, 18 social homes were agreed at Hillview. At Belfast Harbour, the £275m masterplan for ‘office led regeneration’ saw approval of a ‘City Quays 4’ riverside ‘build to rent’ apartment complex; here, developers were allowed to satisfy the new Belfast LDP requirement for 20% affordable homes by committing to build 71 ‘affordable’ units on a separate site several streets inland. Meanwhile the planned ‘Waterside Belfast’ development at the former Sirocco Works site saw approval in 2019 for 675 residential units (of which at least 67 were to be social homes; notably the HOU5 policy requirement would now indicate that around double that number should be provided); but subsequently stalled. Meanwhile, housing need continues to climb.

The overall picture? Rather than a deliberate, targeted state response to meet housing need where it is most acute, what we see is a primarily developer-led, for-profit process, in which new planning regulations may produce a bit more ‘affordable’ housing for purchase or rent by intermediate earners than previously, but where social homes for people who desperately need them remain a low priority.

The full submission can be accessed here.