Social housing in Northern Ireland is allocated by the Northern Ireland Housing Executive (NIHE) using a points system first designed in the 1970s. Points reflect need: homelessness, poor conditions, overcrowding. One category stands far above the rest. Applicants who have been intimidated out of their homes can receive 200 points, more than any other single award.
The reasoning is obvious. People driven out by sectarian, racial or paramilitary threats need a new home urgently. But researchers and politicians have argued for years that the system has a side effect: it gives the groups making threats a lever over who lives where.
How the system works
Intimidation points apply if a home has been destroyed or seriously damaged in a terrorist, sectarian or racial attack, or if the applicant faces a serious and imminent risk of death or serious injury. NIHE figures cited by Cambridge researcher Kaitlin Ball in 2021 showed that in 2017–18 around four in five accepted intimidation applicants were fleeing paramilitary intimidation. At the start of the pandemic, in March 2020, almost 39,000 households were on the waiting list.
Threats have to be verified. That can be done by the police, but Ball's research found it was often done through community organisations and charities, some of which have contacts with paramilitary groups.
The concerns
Ball described several patterns from interviews: people forced out of an estate by threats or attacks so that others could move in; groups tipping each other off about "undesirable" residents; and cases where people threatened by paramilitaries were recorded as having been threatened by "the community", leaving them with few options. In 2016 Sinn Féin said the points were being abused to jump the queue. Others have pointed out that most applicants are genuine victims who would be left with nothing if the points were removed.
What government decided
After a public consultation launched in 2017, the Communities Minister Deirdre Hargey decided in 2021 to keep intimidation points, saying they were still needed to protect the most vulnerable, while tightening verification. Critics welcomed the protection and worried that verification would still depend on people close to the groups doing the threatening.
The wider point
Northern Ireland's social housing remains largely segregated, and the Housing Executive owns land along many peace walls. Researchers such as Ball argue that the deeper fix is supply: if waiting lists were short, a points jump would matter less, and so would the people able to arrange one. Our article on a family forced out of Cregagh in 2021 shows how these threats look from the street.