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69
On the 24th June, 1908, the Medical Officer of Health reported to the
Drainage Sub-Committee as follows:—
The whole Borough is divided into four Parliamentary Divisions, eight
Wards, and twenty Sub-Divisions. The Sub-Divisions are the units upon
which the Borough is built up, so to speak, just as the Parishes are the
units upon which the Local Government Areas are built up. With these
as units, by combining the Sub-Divisions the data may be recorded in
Wards, by combining the Wards in Parliamentary Divisions (which are also
the Registrar-General's Sub-Districts), and by combining the Divisions the
data for the whole Borough may be obtained. These are the several areas as
shown upon the map of the Borough and in the Street List Index published
by the Council; it is in these areas that all the records are kept, and to insure
permanency, continuity, and comparability, it is essential that their boundaries
should not be altered.
With the Sub-Divisions as permanent initial units it becomes possible to
keep under observation and control the work of inspection, and yet the units
of area are so small that one, two, three or more units may be allotted to an
Inspector according to the amount of work required in each unit without
impairing the records, as the units can be added together to obtain records of
larger areas.
I beg to recommend—
That the Sub-Divisions of the Borough be the minimum units of area
of the Districts of the Sanitary Inspectors.
In order to ascertain the probable amount of work in each sub-division, the
number of dwelling places, of work-places, of drainage applications and plans,
of complaints and of infectious diseases in each of the sub-divisions have been
tabulated and multiplied by 4, 2, 8, 3, and ½ respectively, which are the
approximate number of visits on an average of each of these several places
inspected. These have been totalled and are set out in the table accompanying
this report. In addition to this the sub-divisions in each of the divisions
North, South, East, and West have been set out and totalled.
From this table it will be seen that South St. Pancras requires approximately
twice as many visits to be paid as North St. Pancras, and that East and West
St. Pancras is intermediate between North and South. So that from actual
figures the indication is that South St. Pancras should have twice as many
Inspectors as North, and Central St. Pancras should stand between the two;
that is to say, two in the North, four in the South, three in the East, and three
in the West. When the sub-divisions are classed together so as to form
Inspectors' areas a similar number would appear to be the proper distribution
as shown in the table. In addition to this I would call the attention of your
Sub-Committee to the map of overcrowding published in my annual report of
1903, from which it will be seen that the most overcrowded areas are in South
St. Pancras and in the southern portion of East and West St. Pancras as confirmatory
of the greater amount of inspection required in this neighbourhood.
Judging, therefore, by the actual figures of premises and of inspections at the