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63
SECTION D
Housing.
Housing, by reason of its importance in the field of preventive
medicine, is to a great extent a public health problem and responsibility.
The provision of houses of good standard is a pre-requisite
for the elimination of disease, mental and physical, and the following
remarks indicate a public health attitude towards housing matters.
General.—As indicated in previous Reports, housing has
become of paramount importance throughout the country during
the post-war period. Prior to 1939 housing difficulties had been
encountered mainly in the lower income groups and, until the
Housing Act, 1949, Local Authorities' housing powers were restricted
to the benefit of persons of the working class only; but to-day all
income groups are concerned with this vital question. The house is
the basis of family life and good family life is the basis of a healthy
and prosperous nation. The need for homes, therefore, makes
housing the most urgent of social problems.
The pre-war rate of house building, which reached its peak
during 1938, was sufficiently satisfactory to enable slum clearance
schemes to operate; but the recent war so altered the situation that
these schemes had to be postponed and a system of "repair and
maintenance" of property was forced upon Local Authorities. It
is this latter {joint which gives so much trouble to Public Health
Departments especially as rigid rent control and the steep rise in the
cost of repairs make property owners reluctant to comply with
Sanitary Notices.
Owners are finding it impossible to keep property in a reasonable
state of repair under present conditions and there is a need for some
revision of existing rent and housing legislation.
During the latter half of the nineteenth century an urgent and
insistent demand for thousands of houses resulted in urban areas
becoming congested with dwellings of poor design erected with
scant regard for rational planning or the comfort and needs of the
tenants.
In the period between the two World wars, measures culminating
in the 1936 Housing Act, were introduced to provide
remedies for this unsatisfactory state of affairs. Unfortunately, the
present-day shortage of accommodation precludes the use of Section
11 of the 1936 Act in all but the most exceptional cases and under
Section 9 the Local Authority is enabled to insist on houses being
made fit for human habitation only in cases where such repairs can