View report page

88
Section G.
HOUSING.
The Housing problem has become more acute during the year
under review. The situation which was already sufficiently serious to
call for action by the Legislature on wide and comprehensive lines,
became aggravated by the return of demobilised Service men. The
Housing Committee, while attempting all that lay within their power
in the matter of the provision of housing accommodation, found their
activities restricted and hampered in various ways. Indeed, the
necessity for making Closing Orders, with a view to the ultimate
improvement of premises, was a matter for serious consideration owing
to the great difficulty of the persons who would thus be dishoused
finding other accommodation. So far as the Town Ward Scheme was
concerned, the Committee came to the conclusion that it would be
imperative to provide housing accommodation for the population to be
dis-housed when the first section of property included in the scheme
was dealt with; and it was with this object in view that the vacant
land in New End, known as the "Workhouse Garden," occupied by
the Board of Guardians, and later, the South End Green site, was
taken into consideration as a possible site on which housing facilities
could be provided for the people living in houses comprised in the Town
Ward Scheme in respect of which Closing Or.'ers were to be made.
It is obvious that the "Housing Question," in the widest sense of
the term, will not and cannot be solved by the erection of buildings on
all the available sites in London and other large towns; or by the
maisonetting of suitable houses, or by the application of Closing
Orders to insanitary premises. The former plan, while it provides
housing accommodation, also increases the denseness of the population,
and to increase the number of persons per acre in large towns already
crowded, may be neither desirable nor wise. Again, rigorously to
apply Closing Orders to insanitary premises when practically no other
accommodation is available, is no real remedy for the evil. For each
local sanitary authority to attempt to put into operation its own
housing schemes, however relatively small, is of course good to a
limited degree; but the great housing question can only be dealt with
properly in its entirety by other means, in addition to local improvements
in existing houses and sites, such as comprehensive schemes of