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Your officers who are interested in ante-natal work, and particularly your
Pathologist, are giving attention to this matter, and I do hope that we shall be
able to put certain suggestions before you, but work of this nature takes time.
Administratively, I must still flog the obvious point which from year to year
I put before you, which is that the nutrition of people who are unemployed, and
their dependants, must be properly co-ordinated. At the present time we have
in Barking the Public Assistance Committee, the Maternity and Child Welfare
Committee, the Education Committee, the Tuberculosis After-Care Committee
and several voluntary agencies who in their own way are doing something to improve
the common standard of diet of people who are in this way, or in that, necessitous.
Nutrition, it is my submission, is one of the most serious, if not the most serious
of all problems. It is even more important than housing, and I do submit that it is
so serious that it should be tackled by one body, and should not be a sideline of
four or five separate bodies.
(c) Housing.—Elsewhere in this Report I am showing that during the year six
Compulsory Purchase Orders were confirmed, involving 163 houses and 828 persons.
This means that we have completed our Housing Programme for the period 19331938,
save only for a modest number of houses, i.e., under 50. In turn this means
you have improved the whole standard of housing in Barking, and because you are
allowed to take into account the general level of housing in the area, it must mean
that in any of your schemes from 1938 onwards, you can have, and you will have a
different sense of values than obtained in the past. Nevertheless, may I make it
clear that, however good it is to pull down the old properties which have outlived
their usefulness, it is a far better thing to plan a new town where people can live
under conditions in which they can maintain their efficiency and their health.
So far as housing is concerned, I know of no one factor which takes pride of place
over the necessity of having a population properly spaced, and I am persuaded
that 60 persons per acre is not the ideal at which we should aim—it is an obvious
standard which we should always attain.
(d) Travelling Facilities.—What I have said about housing refers, of course,
very aptly to those houses on wheels which we call trains. I think we should look
upon trains as houses upon wheels, because then overcrowding in trains would be
recognised as the undoubted nuisance it is. It is intolerable that our standards in
travelling facilities have lagged 100 years behind our standards in housing, in
schools, in factories, in cinemas and other places where men and women are wont
to congregate together. Those who are jointly responsible for the present
conditions of passenger traffic serving Barking live in a bygone age.