Over many years of campaigning on housing rights, PPR has focused on pushing for the provision of of housing based on housing need. In other words, that more houses would be built in the areas that need them most. From our own data and experience over these years, we have found that houses are not always being built where they need to be.

But what does the Housing Executive data say?

Well, we don’t know.

The Housing Executive has its own mapping system, which it uses to record and report housing need. It has repeatedly refused to share this data with us, or make it public. This means that their statistics on waiting lists, housing stress and homelessness numbers, as well as allocations of homes, are impossible to pin down geographically or to compare against each other.

It is impossible then, using any Housing Executive information, for us to track the extent to which new social homes are being built where there is the highest demand for them.

So in classic PPR fashion, rather than waiting for this data to become available to us, we decided to take matters into our own hands, using the 2021 census to compare deprivation data with social housing data. Ná habair é, déan é!

The data showed us what we have been saying for years, that in some of the most deprived areas in the north, particularly in North and West Belfast, houses are not being built where they are needed.

The data showed us what we have been saying for years, that in some of the most deprived areas in the north, particularly in North and West Belfast, houses are not being built where they are needed.

What we found was that generally, social housing provision is in line with deprivation levels. But this is not always the case. The data showed us what we have been saying for years, that in some of the most deprived areas in the north, particularly in North and West Belfast, houses are not being built where they are needed.

Zooming in on deprivation in Belfast, South and East were found to have social housing provision largely in line with deprivation levels, and in some areas more housing than would be expected. North and West Belfast had significantly less, and the area around the Mackie’s site, where the Take Back the City coalition has been campaigning for more social homes, has almost the lowest level of housing provision relative to deprivation in the whole of Belfast and indeed the north.

In the interest of transparency, we have published all our findings as well as the research methods which brought us there, which can be found here.

Perhaps the statutory bodies could consider doing the same?

Check out the four part series by clicking on the articles below:

Part 1: ‘A win for logic, a win for transparency’: using the 2021 census to fill a crucial information gap

Part 2: What does the 2021 census tell us about deprivation and tenancy in different areas (and why it’s important to be able to look at smaller geographic areas, to see just how much variation there is)

Part 3: What can the Census tell us about the relationship between deprivation and social housing provision?

Part 4: What can the census data tell us about social housing provision and deprivation in Belfast?

Authors: Noreen O’Sullivan, Ellen McVeigh, & Paige Jennings