The Departments for Communities & Justice want to amend legislation related to their powers to address Anti-Social Behaviour by tenants of the Northern Ireland Housing Executive and local housing associations. These powers are far-reaching and  include the ability to evict people from their home. With such serious potential impacts, before they change legislation, they need to check what the impacts of their proposed policies may be on different groups and communities.

In their consultation on the potential impacts of changes to their powers, the Departments took some data from the 2021 census, and set it alongside Housing Executive data on evictions: 

“In Housing Executive case data covering evictions related to ASB (2018/19-2023/24), 55.2% of cases identified as Catholic, 37.9% as Protestant and 6.9% not known.

Within social housing (Northern Ireland Housing Executive and Housing Association or charitable trust), those who identify as Catholic represent 44.6% compared to 34.4% for Protestant and Other Christian, 1.9% for other religions and 19.1% who identify as having no religion or religion not stated.”

They argued that:

“the higher rate of Catholic possession cases can be caveated by the Census results showing a higher proportion of Catholic households in the social rented sector.”

The implication was that a higher proportion of evictions cases among people from a Catholic background was merely a function of a higher proportion of  Catholic households in the social rented sector -  and therefore there would be no need to undertake any kind of mitigating steps when designing legislation and implementing policy.

We wanted to understand more about what might be happening and decided to fact check the Department’s data. Is there really a higher percentage of Catholic households in social housing? And would that explain the difference in the rates of eviction?

Our analysis shows that there are a similar number and percentage of households from either background in social housing.  In Table 1 below , we show the 2021 Census data on Religious Background in relation to each Tenure.  There are 53,108 social homes with people from a Catholic background, and 51,657 social homes with people from the Protestant background, a 1.2% point difference. 

Table 1: Religious Background as a function of tenure, at Household level

There are lots of different hypotheses about what might cause the difference in eviction rates – including deprivation and policing. But the bottom line is there is not a higher percentage of Catholic households in social housing, therefore, other than guesses, we have no idea why Catholics appear to be more likely to be evicted from Housing Executive homes.  And as the Departments’ conclusion on this issue is wrong, they need to dig deeper on why that might be. 

How did the Departments of Communities and Justice end up thinking there are more Catholic than Protestant households in social housing? 

In addition to extracting Religious Background data from the census, it is also possible to extract Religious Identity data.  More people identify as not religious now than in the past, but these same people can still be coded as having a religious background.  If we select population-level data (so the number of people as opposed to the number of households), and look at how Religious Identity is distributed across tenures, these numbers have a different pattern to Religious Background data, see Tables 2 and 3.

Table 2: Religious Background as a function of tenure, at Household- and Population level

The teal data are Religious Background data, at Household Level.  The light purple colour is also Religious Background data, now at Population Level.  There do appear to be more individual people from a Catholic background in social housing, sitting at around 8%.  Though with a similar number of social homes, this just means that there are more Catholics, on average, per home.

The blue colour is Religious Identity data at Population Level.  Here, we see that the difference between people from Catholic and Protestant backgrounds is largest, at 10%.  So 44.6% of people in social housing presently practice as Catholic, whereas only 34.4% of people in social housing presently practice as Protestant. 

However- saying that there is a 10% difference in present religiosity levels between Catholics and Protestants in social housing is not the same as reporting, on the basis of this same difference, that more households from a Catholic background live in social housing.

Table 3: Distribution of households and people from a Catholic and Protestant background in social housing relative to current Religious Identity levels.

Choosing the wrong measures has consequences.  Here, both Departments think that a full Equality Impact Assessment on the legislative measures they are bringing in that will affect ASB-related convictions is unnecessary. 

We completely disagree. 

If we do not know now why more Catholics appear to be at risk of eviction, what potential impact do we think harsher legislation could have on a background difference? 

A full EQIA would indeed be the just and reasonable course of action, given the findings here.