The Green Party in Northern Ireland wants to criminalise private landlords but decriminalise heroin as they claim that will solve the housing crisis. The party also want to ban anyone buying a second home, force the local or central government to buy all second homes in the UK and then give them to homeless people to live in.

Local Green party leader Mal O'Hara made these policies known on the BBC's Talkback programme with William Crawley this week. Mr O'Hara further claimed that the private rented sector was unregulated, an astonishingly inaccurate statement that went un-fact checked by the BBC. Mr O'Hara is well aware of the raft of new regulations that have been applied to the sector under the recent Private Tenancies Act, so the comments were both misleading and disingenuous.

Whilst politicians can come up with whatever policy ideas they want, we think that they should be basing those policies on fact and not trying to mislead the public by making false or inaccurate statements. The Greens also want rent controls, but he was reminded by an economist on the show that there was no evidence that rent controls work. Rent controls have been shown to have the opposite effect, reducing both the quantity and quality of private rental housing. Mr O'Hara also cited the rise in rents over the last few years, but failed to explain that in part these were as a result of over regulation and taxation forcing landlords out, reducing the supply of rental property.