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4
can many afford the rents. I am afraid that a man earning round
about £3 per week is not likely to meet with much success when
applying for a house. A rent of 15s. 6d. for a three-room cottage at
Becontree is beyond his powers. Numbers without end must live in
Deptford to be near their work, to report for duty at 7 a.m. What is
the position ? What are the needs in Deptford? Before dealing with
these questions we must examine that tricky word "overcrowding."
It is true that this pre-war word is not out of date; if slavishly
adhered to it can give a wrong impression. By "overcrowding" the
Registrar-General means a house in which there are over two persons
per room. Yes, but what size of room, and of what cubic capacity,
one asks? Manchester, amongst other things, looks at the problem
from the number of people per bedroom: over 2½ persons per bedroom
is considered overcrowding. To be scrupulously fair we have, in the
overcrowding figures given below, counted two children under ten
years of age as one adult; thus the figures hardly represent the full
facts.
Now the true way to ascertain the Borough's needs is to take
several streets of houses of average "class," and ascertain not only the
overcrowding but also the number of families there are per house. It
is of course quite a common experience to find two families in a house
without overcrowding. The existence of two or more families in a
small house which is not adapted for the needs of more than one, is in
itself sufficient evidence of the need for more accommodation; there is
bound to be either friction or heartburning, or at least inconvenience
where there are two families in one house.
In 1927, we ascertained once again the Borough's needs in two
ways : (a) By house-to-house inspection of 2,832 houses. In making
these inspections the Sanitary Inspectors were not asked to go to any
special streets; they took those which were due, in the course of time,
for routine inspection. (b) By inspection of houses on complaint or
as the result of the occurrence of cases of infectious diseases. In the
body of the Report I shall deal with these later.
As regards (a), the number of families living in the 2,832 houses
was 4,851. Of these, 2,718 families, or 56 per cent., were living two
families per house; i.e., 1,359 houses contained two families each. 822