CIH Northern Ireland's response to the Department of Finance’s consultation on the draft budget 2026-2029/30

Yes.

Social housing

The draft budget proposes that the Department for Communities’ capital spending will increase from approximately £295 million in 2026/27 to a planned £404 million by 2029/30. While this trajectory provides a welcome recognition of social housing as vital infrastructure, it will likely fall short of the true scale of need in the face of persistent construction cost inflation. The social housing waiting list has grown to almost 50,000 households, demonstrating that we must move beyond short-term targets and commit to funding a long-term approach that recognises housing as a foundation for health and wellbeing.

The long-term economic benefits that can flourish from significant housing investment include job creation, improved health and wellbeing, and reduction in public expenditure for emergency housing solutions.

We urge the NI Executive and relevant departments to review capital funding, streamline planning processes, and invest in vital infrastructure to ensure everyone in Northern Ireland has a safe, affordable and quality home to call their own.

Homelessness

The most recent Homelessness Bulletin from the Department for Communities, released 11 December 2025 and covering April to September 2025, has shown a deepening crisis where the system is failing to provide safe and accessible homes for older people.

The data shows the single largest driver of homelessness continues to be the lack of suitable accommodation, largely for those with health needs, often trapping older people in unsuitable homes and increasingly temporary accommodation.

We welcome the recent uplift in funding provided for the vital Supporting People programme, but it unfortunately is not adequate to account for inflationary costs and other financial pressures for SP-funded organisations delivering homelessness services. This places an unavoidable strain on critical support services.

CIH believes the budget should ringfence funding for the introduction of a statutory duty to prevent homelessness. This should mandate cooperation across health, housing and social services to better protect people and make sustainable progress towards addressing and preventing homelessness in Northern Ireland. Funding should support comprehensive prevention services that include community-based initiatives and strategic measures, such as the Housing First programme.

Preventing homelessness is more cost effective than responding to it, and the draft budget should provide targeted funding to address this. While we welcome the additional capital funding in this draft budget to address the need for social housing infrastructure, it will not meet the levels of need in Northern Ireland or fully alleviate the ongoing pressure on homeless services.

Wastewater infrastructure

The Department for Communities’ Housing Supply Strategy 2024-2039 recognises that insufficient wastewater infrastructure in Northern Ireland is hindering economic development. This issue is once again recognised in the draft budget proposals, but CIH has concerns that the budget will not resolve the significant gaps in required funding.

Independent analysis commissioned by NI Chamber, CEF and NIFHA with Grant Thornton and Turley last year, together with the findings of the NI Fiscal Council, estimate a £2 billion funding gap in capital infrastructure for wastewater. This funding gap is preventing the construction of 6,150 homes being built over the next three years, resulting in 2,530 jobs lost from the construction sector, and the loss of an estimated £271.4 million of gross value added to the economy in Northern Ireland.

The draft budget includes additional funding for water infrastructure through a 5 per cent increase in household regional rates. This is welcome but it still falls far short of the level required to remove development constraints across the region.  The Wastewater Infrastructure Group, of which CIH is a member, estimates that a funding gap of £1.36 billion for the draft budget period still remains.

CIH and the Wastewater Infrastructure Group supports the introduction of a progressive Infrastructure Levy, payable through the rates system. This levy would average out at £1.25 per household per week or £65 per annum. This levy would create a long-term sustainable, multi-year investment model for NI Water and enable stalled housing, industrial and regeneration projects to proceed.

Decarbonisation

The Department for Communities’ Housing Supply Strategy 2024-2039 lists low carbon housing as a key objective for the strategy. This ensures that the construction of new housing and retrofitting of existing homes enables people to afford to heat their homes reduces the risk of fuel poverty. It also allows Northern Ireland to meet its emission targets, as specified in the Climate Change Act (NI) 2022.

While incorporating energy efficient and low/zero-carbon solutions in new developments is very welcome, and funding should be targeted to address this, sufficient funding and support for retrofitting is essential. Sixty-eight per cent of domestic heating in Northern Ireland is provided by oil-fired boilers. Existing, inefficient homes with poor fabric performance and carbon-heavy heating systems present a serious challenge in the scale and cost of emissions. This results in high rates of fuel poverty where households must choose between bearing the burden of expensive heating bills or living in unsuitable conditions.

The draft budget should include specific provision for the support of retrofitting older homes, balancing this with funding for energy efficient infrastructure in new developments. 

Yes. Enhancing the sustainability of public services and finances is needed to enable the long-anticipated transformation of service delivery. Such measures are critical to ensure the adequate financing of essential services, including housing and support services that communities across Northern Ireland depend upon.

We would support the reduction of early payment discount for domestic rates, which reflects a financially prudent approach to better align revenue collection with current funding needs.

While this change will generate only modest additional revenue in the broader context of Northern Ireland’s funding demands, they demonstrate the type of difficult but necessary decisions required to strengthen public finances.

The absence of a sufficient revenue stream for water provision in Northern Ireland continues to hinder the financial resources available for reinvestment in necessary maintenance and upgrading of water and wastewater infrastructure. This limitation has become a barrier to the delivery of much-needed homes, with capacity constraints directly impacting housing development.

The introduction of a modest £1.25 levy per household per week in Northern Ireland would address the funding gap to deliver a long term sustainable, multi-year investment model for NI Water and enable stalled housing, industrial and regeneration projects to proceed. It would provide a substantial reinvestment into critical infrastructure and deliver a boost to the Northern Ireland economy in the form of jobs in the construction sector and the unblocking of housing development projects. 

Northern Ireland is experiencing a housing crisis, with cross-cutting impacts on the health, wellbeing and security of everyone. The waiting list for social housing and the concerning number of people experiencing homelessness point to a failure to protect and support some of the most vulnerable in our communities.

The draft budget recognises the strategic importance of housing and provides a welcome increase in capital funding for the Department for Communities. However, we believe this draft budget does not go far enough, leaving gaps in much-needed funding requirements and missing opportunities to create long-term and sustainable solutions to the housing crisis.

Access to a safe, secure and affordable place to call home is fundamental to social and economic wellbeing, and we believe more targeted and robust funding provision to deliver these critical services will improve the quality of life for everyone in Northern Ireland. 

To view the details of the consultation please visit the government’s website

For more information on our response please contact Georgia Knapp CIHM, policy and public affairs manager Northern Ireland by emailing georgia.knapp@cih.org.