View report page

127
advise your Vestry to take this course, being of opinion that
it would be impracticable even if it were desirable; for if the
Asylums Board were unable to obtain sites, Where, I asked,
should forty Vestries, &c., look for sites? It is true that the
Sanitary Authorities are not hampered by the necessity of
obtaining the sanction of the Local Government Board; and
that they have statutory authority to provide hospitals, permanent
or temporary, "for the use of the inhabitants of their
district (Public Health (London) Act, 1891, Sec. 75); but
any attempt to set up a local hospital would be frustrated in
the future as similar attempts had been frustrated in the past.
Apart from this, and for reasons set out again and again in
these reports during the last seventeen years, I was and am
entirely opposed to the provision of local hospitals.
It only remains to add that the expression of their views
by the Managers, as above set out, was not without effect, for
soon afterwards theyobtainedthesanction of the Local Government
Board to the acquisition of the sites at Lewisham,
Woolwich, and Tooting, on which hospitals will be provided
with the net result of adding some 2,000 beds to the existing
accommodation of the Board.
Conference of Sanitary Authorities.—It need
hardly be said that the difficulties of the Asylums Board,
arising out of the impediments to the acquisition of sites,
secured for the Managers the sympathetic consideration of
the several Sanitary Authorities, on whose behalf indeed, they
were acting. This feeling found expression in June, at a Conference
of the Sanitary Authorities convened by the Vestry
of St. Marylebone, at which, fully one-half of the said authorities
being represented, the following resolution was all but
unanimously adopted :
" That, in view of the urgent necessity of further provision being made for
the rapidly increasing number of persons suffering from Infectious
Disease, and the declared inability of the Metropolitan Asylums Board
to provide the necessary accommodation, this Conference do appoint
a Deputation to wait upon the Local Government Board for the purpose
of urging them to facilitate the acquisition of Sites by the Metropolitan
Asylums Board, or the provision of suitable Buildings."