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(ii) to require the provision of additional facilities and amenities essential to
decent living conditions, and the provision of adequate means of escape
from fire;
(iii) for local authorities to carry out works themselves in default and recover
the cost; and
(iv) to make a direction limiting the number of persons who may live in a house
or part of a house, which is in multiple occupation.
The powers are designed to deal primarily with the worst type of multi-occupied
house.
Part I of the Regulations mentioned in (i) above deals with their application and
interpretation; Part II prescribes the duties of management to be discharged by the manager
of the house; and Part III deals with ancillary requirements including the provision of information.
It also places certain obligations on occupants for the purpose of ensuring that the
manager can effectively carry out his duties.
Responsibility for management will rest on an owner or lessee who receives the
rents or other payments from tenants or lodgers, including any agent or trustee through whom
the rents are received.
The main substance of the code of management iscontained in Part II of the Regulations
which deals with the manager's responsibilities for repair and maintenance. Broadly,
these responsibilities amount to ensuring the repair (including reasonable decorative repair),
cleanliness and good order of the parts of the house in common use; the proper maintenance
throughout the house of installations for basic services, such as water supply, drainage, gas
and electricity; the repair and good order of all means of ventilation and means of escape
from fire. The manager is also required to ensure an adequate provision of refuse bins and
to take reasonable precautions to protect tenants from injury as a result of structural conditions
in the house.
Where rooms are let to tenants or lodgers as their living accommodation, the
manager must ensure that the rooms are clean and in a reasonable state of structural repair
at the commencement of the letting and that defects are remedied in the rooms which are
already let, when the Regulations are applied to a house. There is a continuing obligation
for the repair and proper working order of installations in the rooms, for the supply of water,
gas and electricity as well as baths, sinks, basins and sanitary conveniences.
In Part III of the Regulations a general obligation is placed onoccupants to take
reasonable care not to hinder the manager in carrying out his duties.
Regulation 14 requires the manager to display in a suitableposition in the house
a notice containing his name and address and that of any other manager with an indication
of his interest (i.e., agent or trustee), a copy of the Management Order, a copy of the
Regulations and, if the local authority require, a notice which the authority may provide
for indicating briefly the main provisions of the Regulations.
The Regulations do not stand in isolation, and they must be taken together with
existing powers under the Housing Act, 1957, and the powers contained in the 1961 Act
relating to the provisionof additional services and facilities and the prevention or reduction
of overcrowding. It is likely that there will be houses where Orders applying a code of
management, prescribed in the Regulations, will be all that are necessary to bring about an
improvement in conditions, In others, the reason for the unsatisfactory state of affairs will
be not so much bad management as lack of essential facilities. To put this right, a local
authority can require the necessary work to be done and, where need be, link the notice of
works with a direction limiting the number of occupants in a house. In the very worst type
of houses conditions may be so bad that, to effect any real improvement, it will be necessary
to take action at one and the same time to secure better management, additional facilities,
and a limitation on the number of occupants.
The premises affected vary considerably, and render impracticable the provision
of a single rigid code of requirements applicable to all cases. The Council have adopted
certain minimum requirements as standards of essential services and amenities. These were
given in detail in my reports for 1962.
PLAN OF ACTION
In January, 1963, the Medical Officer of Health reported to the Public Health
Committee of the Kensington Council on the improvement of houses and, inter alia, referred