BELFAST Platform

Background

The Housing Executive is the major social housing landlord in Northern Ireland with a housing stock of 93,000 dwellings. The breakdown of the housing stock is as follows:

As can be seen above, 80% of NIHE stock is single or two-storey individual houses and all with individual gas, oil or coal fired heating systems,. Some 20% of dwellings are flats including low, medium and high-rise blocks but all have individual gas, oil or electric heating systems. None of the NIHE stock including the flats has a community or district heating system or any system that is centrally managed on behalf of tenants. All NIHE tenants are responsible for paying their heating and electricity bills to the supplier directly - the landlord has no role in this. The landlord's role is simply to provide the heating or electricity system, repair and maintain it, but takes no role in billing or metering.

With nearly 75% of Northern Ireland's households owning their own home, the tenants of the NIHE tend to be households who cannot afford home ownership. All NIHE tenants tend to have low incomes with around 80% of NIHE tenants living on some form of social welfare benefits. The stock is generally well insulated with high efficiency boilers for heating with 35% of tenants using oil, 25% using natural gas, 20% coal and 13% using electricity for heating.

Energy Management

Irrespective of what type of fuel used, tenants have always been responsible for managing their own energy consumption. Gas and electricity are metered fuels and tenants receive quarterly statements on consumption but this data has never been shared with the landlord by the utilities and more recently, cannot be shared for Data Protection reasons. Coal and oil are non-metered fuels so tenants using these fuels must manage their own consumption data by retaining records of invoices when they buy fuel – in practice the vast majority of tenants do not do this and, if asked how much fuel they use, would have to estimate their annual fuel consumption. Tenants often rely on energy efficiency advice from their landlords, fuel supplier or energy advice centre on how they can conserve energy.

Motivation of Landlord

NIHE is the Home Energy Conservation Authority for NI with the aim of assisting all householders including tenants to save energy. We also wish to help prevent or minimise fuel poverty. We do this by improving the energy efficiency of the stock by switching from inefficient heating systems like coal and electricity to more efficient systems like gas or oil, installing high efficiency boilers, enhancing insulation levels and by providing advice to tenants. In this project, we provided more in-depth advice to 38 tenants who did not understand how to use their heating controls efficiently. Also in an attempt to use new technology we brought the Self Assessment Tool to 160 tenants via Personal Digital Assessors (PDAs) as only a tiny minority of our tenants have internet access.

Constraints on services

The internet portal services offered in France and Germany were inappropriate for NI given the extremely low level of internet access among NIHE tenants. Internet access in NI is not provided by landlords but is a private arrangement with the householder and supplier - as most NIHE tenants are on low incomes they cannot afford this expensive service. These services were also constrained by the fact that utilities in NI do not share energy consumption data with landlords and the housing stock in NI, unlike many European countries, does not have communal heating systems.

Expected benefits

By providing more in-depth advice on use of heating controls, providing the self-assessment tool through the PDA service, the Housing Executive helps tenants to save energy. This is in line with our responsibilities under the Home Energy Conservation Act and helps to develop our image as a responsible landlord.