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210
1905]
DISTRICT INSPECTION.
The general inspection of the Borough employs the services of 14
Inspectors, to each of whom has been allotted a district containing on an average
a little more than 25,000 inhabitants, a number sufficiently large to tax
the time, energy and ability of any one man.
These Inspectors' duties are many and varied, for they have not only to
visit every house where an infectious disease has occurred in order that information
may be sent as directed by the Public Health (London) Act, 1891, to the Education
Department of the London County Council, but ihey also inspect the
houses in their districts, the ice cream shops and factories, the dairies and milkshops,
the stable yards, the manure depots, workshops where drainage work is
being carried out, examine new houses that require water certificates, or
certificates under the Customs and Inland Revenue Acts, attend to smoke
nuisances and generally exercise the sanitary control of their districts.
The year has been productive of a considerable amount of very useful work,
for during it 67,829 inspections of all classes of houses were made, in addition
to which it is estimated that over 6,000 visits were paid on Saturday nights
to places where meat and food were sold, from which it will be seen that an
Inspector's work is not only of a varied but a responsible character.
Inspections and Yisits.—The actual number of houses inspected was
8,996, of which 1,725 were visited as the result of house to house inspection,
while the subsequent visits made to these places numbered 58,833, thus making
a total, as already stated, of 67,829 visits.
In the annual report for 1904 it was stated that the agents of a certain
class of property delight in thwarting and placing obstacles in the way of the
Inspectors, and also that certain of these people never attempted to abate a
nuisance on the receipt of an "intimation" from the Sanitary Inspectors, and
that consequently these " intimations " have become so much waste paper,
with the result that many nuisances of a pressing character remained unabated
for an undue period of time. The same observations hold good as to the
conduct of these people during the past year, but in addition there is now
another class of persons springing up, who, when drainage work is required,
do nothing until the statutory notice has been served, lest perchance when they
proceed to execute the work they should discover that the drain was part of a
combined system. They do this because it has been held in the High Court that