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47
SECTION D
HOUSING
(In conjunction with Mr. W. C. Bartlett, Chief Sanitary Inspector).
It is common knowledge that the greater part of the habitable accommodation
in Islington is in the form of multi storey tenement occupation in old-fashioned
houses of the early Victorian period, or of even earlier construction. This position
has been confirmed in the Registrar-General's County of London Report, compiled
from the 1951 Census returns :—
Number of Private Households 81,793
Percentage of Households sharing %
Piped Water Supply 42
Cooking Stove 7
Kitchen Sink 22
Water Closet 53
Fixed Bath 20
Percentage of Households without
Fixed Bath 59
Action under Section 9 of the Housing Act, 1936, not having been resumed
during the year, the service of notices was continued and the necessary follow-up
action taken to secure that dwellings in the Borough were nuisance-free. The
opinions of tenants and other members of the public may differ from those of the
Inspectors, as to what is a nuisance under the Public Health (London) Act, 1936,
and, in the absence of a statutory definition, recourse has to be made to case law,
which is by no means conclusive. In a High Court of Justice in October this year,
it was upheld that walls and ceilings, although dirty, flaking and in need of decorative
repair, were not a nuisance, no dampness or vermin being present.
In a Borough such as Islington, where the majority of property is reaching its
centenary, and a number have well passed that age, difficulty is being experienced
in maintaining the properties in a reasonable state. Many houses are structurally
sound, but uneconomic due to the high cost of labour and material. This fact is
supported by the findings of the Committee of Inquiry into the Cost of House
Maintenance, the report of which was issued in April of this year. From this
report it will be seen that, taking 1939 as 100, the index figure for the cost of
maintaining a house in good tenantable repair is 316. In arriving at this conclusion,
the Committee states its wish to emphasise that this index gives their estimate of the
cost of doing today the same amount of maintenance work as was done in 1939.
No account has been taken of any changes in cost which might be due to :
(a) increasing age of houses, and therefore the need to incur more expenditure
on repair of the structure and the replacement of sanitary and
heating eqiupment;