To ask the Minister for Communities to detail (i) how he will ensure the Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE) is able to meet the needs of tenants with disabilities, given the 2025-26 Draft Budget does not include a capital allocation for disability adaptations for NIHE homes; (ii) whether he will commit to carrying out an equality impact assessment with NIHE to understand the impact to tenants of failing to provide disabled adaptations; (iii) how many homes are known to need disabled adaptations, broken down by local council area; and (iv) any proposals the NIHE have provided to fund disabled adaptations to their own properties from within their own budget.

Work is ongoing on options to live within the proposed 2025-26 Budget outcome and the impacts of doing so. As part of this work, an internal exercise to refresh the Department’s forecast 2025-26 requirements has been completed. The information gathered from this exercise will inform my decisions on how the proposed budget should be allocated within the Department.

Departments are expected to conduct their own equality screenings and (where necessary) EQIA consultations, based on the outcome of the draft Budget. Work has begun to assess the impact of my Department’s proposed allocations and fulfil all necessary equality obligations.

Points (iii) and (iv) are operational matters for the Housing Executive. I have sought the requested information from the Chief Executive, who has advised me as follows:

“Major Adaptations only - There are 359nr of MAPD’s (Major Adaptations For Persons With A Disability) awaiting starts broken down by council (Pre-Site). This includes schemes at Project Inception, Briefing and Commissioning, Awaiting Statutory Approvals, Pre-site initiation, Pending Procurement, Tender evaluation, On hold, and OT Referral Stage. There are currently 51 on site being delivered.

Minor Adaptations only - There are currently 739 minor adaptions which are live jobs with our Contractors to undertake works. These are broken down by Council Area below.

Historically the NIHE adaptation programme has been funded by virtue of DfC returning funding generated from NIHE house and land sales back to the NIHE. However, due to DFC funding pressures in the current financial year, this has not happened. Accordingly, the NIHE funded the adaptations programme from rental income receipts in those years. In the event that DfC is again unable to fund the adaptations programme in 2025/26 (as yet unknown), then NIHE could again consider funding this from rental income receipts. In this eventuality, it is possible that investment in the 2025/26 adaptations programme may have to be scaled back (in the wider context of the NIHE Landlord having insufficient financial capacity to meet medium term priority stock investment requirements, as highlighted as part of the NIHE Revitalisation review).”