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193
Housing of the Working Classes—Statistics.
vacation, but the amount of £222 7s. 3d. or .10 per cent. (2s. 0d. per £100) of the gross rental
has been included in the accounts as irrecoverable.
During the year the Council did not rehouse any persons who had been displaced by the
Council's improvement and clearance schemes. The total number of displaced persons rehoused
to 81st March. 1912. is 1,756.
Rehousing.
The usual annual enumeration of tenants of the Council's dwellings was taken in March, 1912,
and showed that the rooms (excluding lodging houses), available for letting, were
actually occupied by 32,610 persons, or an average of 1.24 persons per room. The birth rate for the
year amounted to 27.5 per 1,000, and the death rate (exclusive of the three men's lodging houses) to
8.5 per 1,000. As in previous years, a careful examination of the enumeration returns was made with a
view to the detection of cases of overcrowding. The maximum number of persons to be allowed in
any tenement in the Council's dwellings has been fixed by the Committee at two persons per room,
children up to the age of 5 being for this purpose reckoned as nil, and children between the ages of 5
and 10 as half an adult. This year the number of cases not complying with this standard was 12,
or .13 per cent, of the total number of tenements. The overcrowding is usually found to be due
to one or more children in the tenement having reached the age of 5 or 10 years, and so being
counted in accordance with the Council's scale. This overcrowding is usually remedied by the
removal of the family to a larger tenement in the dwellings.
Census of
tenants.
A sum of £19,071 3s. 8d. (8.86 per cent, of the gross rental) has been spent in repairs to
the buildings during the year. These repairs include external painting at 26 blocks of tenements,
32 blocks of cottage flats and 379 cottages, whitening the soffits and cleaning or painting walls
of 152 staircases, comb graining and varnishing the woodwork of 652 tenements, and cleansing
repairs at 6,771 tenements. The whole of these repairs have been executed by direct labour
employed in the housing department.
Repairs.
During the year 36 small fires occurred in the dwellings. The damage was in every case
slight, and the total cost of reinstatement, amounting to £21 14s. -d., was covered by the
Council's insurance fund.
Fires.
12532
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