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To the Chairman and Members of the
CHISLEHURST & SIDCUP URBAN DISTRICT COUNCIL.
Mr. Chairman, Ladies and Gentlemen,
This is my third Annual Report to you and the seventeenth since
Chislehurst and Sidcup became an Urban District in 1934.
The vital statistics for the year 1950 indicate improvement in the
state of the health of the residents. A birth rate of 15.0, a death rate
of 8.5, and an infant mortality rate of 23.3, are good when compared
with the country as a whole, as one would expect them to be in a
delectable residential area such as Chislehurst and Sidcup.
It has been stated that the improvement in the vital statistics
during the past three years has been due to the functioning of the
National Health Service Act, 1946, but, in my opinion, the main
causes of these improvements lie in full employment and increase in
the spending power of the family, causes which were so strongly
indicated during the war years following 1941 when full employment,
development of meals and milk in schools, and a controlled national
dietary were established by the Government. I was able to show this
in the case of the school child of Bromley when the average height
was increased by half an inch and the weight by one-and-a-half pounds
compared with the pre-war child of 1938.
Accepting vital statistics as a means of assessment of public health
is rather outmoded and one can easily be led astray unless one also
has access to the sickness rate and to the nature and length of the
sickness. I have not these latter figures.
The London County Council St. Paul's Cray Estate was almost
complete at the year's end and this great influx of London residents
into your static population will be apt to upset the balance of your
vital statistics for a few years to come.
Take one factor alone ; in the selection of tenants for the new
estate, the London County Council give preference—and rightly so—
to families with tuberculosis. The percentage of such families allocated
accommodation is approximately twelve per cent, of the whole. As
these families are usually sub-standard in health, there is, thus, a proportionate
increase of them in your population. The effects of this
may not show themselves immediately, nor are the effects in any way
likely to become a permanent feature. Your ratio of children to the
total population is also made higher than your neighbouring authorities
owing to families with children being given high priority for housing.
When large estates are being developed, there is, unfortunately,
delay in the establishment of social services. To take large numbers
of people from one environment where they know and use the social
facilities, to an environment where social services are lacking, leads to