The Housing Executive have just consulted on its House Sales (or ‘right to buy’) Scheme.

Since its introduction in 1979 over 123,000 social homes across Northern Ireland have been sold to tenants. At the same time, building of new ones has stalled: Department of Finance statistics, based on Building Control figures on new build dwellings, show that in the ten-year period between 2016 and 2025 there were just 8,054 new build social homes started*. 

As PPR reported in 2024, ‘right to buy’ helped to permanently change the face of housing in the north. Analysis by the Nevin Economic Research Institute (NERI) found that in 1981 over 39% of NI households lived in Housing Executive social homes; today just one in ten households are Housing Executive tenants, with an additional 4% in housing association social homes (where ‘right to buy’ ended in 2022).

The loss of social homes through private purchase, coupled with the slow replacement rate, have pushed housing need in the north to unprecedented levels, with over 50,300 households on the waiting list. More than 33,400 of them are officially recorded as homeless. These homeless families between them have over 20,500 children under 18 –children that the state has formally recognised are growing up without a home.

The Department for Communities’ draft Housing Supply Strategy, issued in 2021, included a commitment to consult on the future of the Housing Executive House Sales Scheme – but (as PPR highlighted) this was cut from the final (2024) version.  The decision to axe consulting on ‘right to buy’ was consistent with Communities Minister Gordon Lyon’s statements elsewhere (including in response to a range of Assembly questions from concerned MLAs), where he expressed his firm commitment to continuing the scheme. 

The U turn that allowed this ‘right to buy’ consultation to go ahead is perhaps easier to understand after a close look at its contents. It’s not a consultation about the policy itself, its impacts or the (in)advisability of it continuing. The consultation is designed to collect views on five specific proposed tweaks to the existing system. Only one part of one question buried in the middle of the 26 questions making up the consultation survey allows any expression of support for ending, as opposed to reforming, the scheme. Reform is a given; its particulars are the only thing under discussion.

For the record, PPR opposes all five tweaks and asserts that ‘right to buy’ must be scrapped altogether, to protect the north’s existing social housing stock. DFC and NIHE policy staff’s effort and time must instead focus on what’s most important: making more social homes available to people with the greatest objective need.

*For the sake of accuracy and thoroughness we note that the Housing Executive’s publicly available Social Housing Development Programme record (a rolling list of ongoing projects and those ‘programmed to start’) includes some categories that, while not newly-built social homes, would upon completion add to the overall stock of social homes (schemes listed as ‘rehab’, ‘existing satisfactory purchase’, ‘off the shelf’ and ‘reimprovement’, for instance). On 3 July 2026 there appeared to be just over 40 such schemes, out of the 597 listed.

The full text of PPR’s consultation response is here.