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THE HEALTH OF BARKING
give your officers the satisfaction they would like from seeing a job properly
completed.
Within one year of the end of the war, it was our experience in Barking that
our housewives began to expect a return to normality in matters of housing and
this is shown in the number of complaints received during the year which were
4,482, as compared with 2,654 for the previous year.
Statistics in relation to the work of the Sanitary Inspectors are given in
Appendix D.
(B) HOUSING.
STATISTICS.
These will be found in Appendix E.
POST-WAR HOUSING.
From the statistics given, it will be noted that in just over a year after the
end of the war a total of 355 dwellings had been provided.
The demand for new accommodation, measured in terms of applications made
to the Borough, was in respect of 4,500 families. The Council had during the war
years taken such preliminary steps as were available to them to provide accommodation
at the earliest date possible and the proposals were for the erection of
1,080 dwellings in the first two years after the war, as follows :—
Permanent Housing 727
Rebuilding of Corporation Houses 57
Temporary Housing 285
St. Paul's Depot 11
Total 1,080
There are in the district 146 houses which were included in confirmed clearance
areas under the Housing Act, 1936, but still remain occupied.
Our condemned houses are today more fully occupied than ever before, and
more dilapidated. The war lowered the standard of housing just as it did the
standard of living. Nothing is more likely to create slums than the serious reduction
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