Comment

Housing, planning, water and energy: Can Northern Ireland's Programme for Government deliver real change?

The Northern Ireland Executive published its long-awaited draft Programme for Government (PfG) on Monday 9 September 2024[1], outlining nine commitments on a range of policy areas for the remaining three years of the current NI Assembly term. These include “developing a globally competitive and sustainable economy” and “expanding the availability of social, affordable and sustainable housing”. But what could this mean for planning, housing, water and energy?

The publication of a draft Programme for Government is a positive move from an Executive that returned from a two-year hiatus just seven months ago. However, questions remain as to whether the draft PfG’s ambitions are deliverable. Below, our Northern Ireland team provide a summary of the document’s commitments to planning, housing, water and wastewater infrastructure, and climate change, and explore the impact they could have.

Housing

The PfG acknowledges the acute housing crisis in Northern Ireland, with more than 47,000 households on the social housing waiting list, including 35,000 classified as in housing stress. Against a background of a 60-year low of housing completions in 2023, we simply need to build more houses of all kinds.

The Executive commits to increasing the supply of social and affordable housing through the Northern Ireland Housing Supply Strategy. This sets a long-term framework for boosting housing supply across all tenures and innovations in funding models for affordable homes and a focus on public subsidies for social housing.

The draft PfG also commits to the delivery of a ‘Northern Ireland Housing Supply Strategy,’ but the Local Development Plan process remains gridlocked in many council areas. Clarity is needed on how this will be resolved to ensure appropriate housing supply is supported through local councils’ strategic planning.

The Executive’s commitment to “finding solutions and creating opportunities to transform supply and improve quality across the whole housing system” is welcome. However, this ambition is short on detail and there remains concern on how funding for social and affordable homes can be secured.

To this end, we support the intention to work with the Treasury to enable the NI Housing Executive to increase investment. One area, however, where there may be an immediate requirement for the Executive to engage directly with the Treasury is its upcoming spending review in wastewater infrastructure.

Water and wastewater infrastructure

The Executive’s draft PfG acknowledges infrastructure shortcomings, including the need for funding for the ageing wastewater network.

In the context of the 23 cities and towns in Northern Ireland facing restrictions due to insufficient wastewater infrastructure, an overhaul of NI Water funding is an urgent priority. However, the PfG remains silent on politically less palatable solutions such as mutualisation of NI Water or the introduction of water charges. 

This goes way beyond housing, travelling into city/town centre regeneration and the delivery of new schools and health infrastructure. The entire construction and development sector needs clarity on the extent of existing constraints, and what measures can be taken to mitigate short and long-term impacts. 

Decades of chronic underfunding in both housing and waste-water infrastructure, coupled with a two-tiered planning system that often struggles to support the delivery of development in a timely manner, has brought us to the point where many developers are now looking elsewhere to build homes and to invest.

If additional resource cannot be secured to address the long-term drainage beneath our feet, we may all feel it in our pockets. The knock-on impacts of a slowdown in construction will have an impact on everyone - from trades and apprenticeships to suppliers, to the cafes and shops that support workers across the sector. Not to mention making other PfG commitments, particularly around housing supply, undeliverable.

The draft PfG acknowledges the persistent underfunding of water and wastewater infrastructure. The PfG’s Living with Water Programme is part of a strategy to address these challenges, focusing on urban areas like Derry-Londonderry, but without sufficient investment not only will the delivery of new homes slow to a stall, but the economic consequences may also be even more severe.

Planning system

The PfG identifies the need to “improve”   the planning system to support housing delivery, economic development, and environmental sustainability. A Planning Improvement Programme aims to streamline processes and ensure the system works effectively for businesses, communities, and the environment.

However, while the draft mentions these improvements, it is vague about how they will address the systemic issues in Northern Ireland's planning process. Clarity is needed on how the Executive plans to tackle delays and co-ordinate improvement across a system that spans multiple departments and agencies, as well as both central and local government, who are all feeling the strain. Ultimately, it is our view that a review of the funding model needs to be undertaken to understand how best we resource the planning system to deliver on our priorities.

Climate action and renewable energy

While it is welcome to see the Executive’s commitment to publishing a cross-departmental Climate Action Plan, which  acknowledges the potential benefits of energy independence, it is disappointing that this wasn't flagged as one of the nine top priorities. The Executive must go much further in supporting renewable energy investment and development if it is to achieve the legally binding targets already established in the Climate Change Act 2021.

Nowhere in the draft PfG was there a mention of supporting the obligation to meet 80% of electrical generation needs via renewable energy before 2030. This is in stark contrast to the moves made by the UK government who have pressed ahead to setup a new clean energy taskforce to spearhead the move to clean energy by 2030. Without the same ambition, drive and focus in Northern Ireland, failing to deliver on our legally binding targets by 2030 seems increasingly likely.

Northern Ireland has significant untapped potential in this area, and realising it requires stronger policy support to allow the faster delivery of renewable energy technologies and projects from the NI Executive than has been outlined by the draft PfG. The final PfG would need to be clear in how it articulates the roadmap towards clean and green energy. 

The draft Programme for Government sets out some positive intentions to address nine key priorities for the next three years of the assembly mandate. Whilst establishing these priorities is to be welcomed, the devil is in the detail – and there’s precious little of it in the PfG!

With the Executive in ‘listening mode’ during the next eight weeks’ consultation period, we hope that the Departments will be working diligently to turn the PfG’s lofty ambitions into concrete, workable policy solutions.

For more information on the topics discussed above, please get in touch with Michael Jardine, Nick Salt or Jack Gibson.

Further information on the draft PfG and the consultation process can be found here.

12 September 2024

[1] Draft Programme for Government 2024-2027 ‘Our Plan: Doing What Matters Most’ Public Consultation