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Health Department,
Tottenham Town Hall,
The Green,
High Road,
Tottenham, N.15.
To: The Worshipful the Mayor, Aldermen and Councillors
of the London Borough of Haringey.
Ladies and Gentlemen,
I have the honour to present the report to the people of the Borough of Haringey for the year ended
31st December, 1967.
The work of the public health inspectors to improve the environment continues with regular attention
to food hygiene, to offices and shops accommodation and above all to the improvement of housing.
Changing conditions bring new problems — food now passes through the ports in containers and so has
to be examined inland, and noise presents an ever increasing problem calling for skilled measurement,
During the year a major part of their effort was devoted to the London Housing Survey in collaboration
with the Greater London Council Research and Intelligence Unit when a total of 4 per cent of the houses
in the Borough were assessed in order to arrive at a reliable estimate of the quality of London's housing.
The housing situation is changing, because more property is now owner-occupied or Council-owned, so
that now only about a quarter is rented to tenants by private landlords. There is, however, an increasing
number of houses in multi-occupation. Our experience during the last year has emphasised that these
multi-occupied houses have a special fire risk, and the use of fire-proof doors, of "kick through" hatches
and the need for special care with paraffin heaters should be fully understood by all who inhabit or
visit them.
One of the problems that faces Haringey with its substantial population of immigrants from the
West Indies is how to care for small children when the mother goes to work. The Council have four
day nurseries with 198places but there are 28,000 children under five years of age and several thousand
of these are of African descent. The Council's day nurseries can only accommodate a minute fraction
of the children whose parents are most hard pressed by social disaster and diseases. The others must
be cared for in nursery schools and private nurseries or for the most part by child minders or daily
guardians; butthe immigrant community iscrampedfor space, especially for garden space, so necessary
for the early experiences of the small child. Somehow we need to organise the environment so that
the multi-occupied family can use the ground floor and garden of large old homes for the day care of
their small children, and in so doing relieve the tremendous pressure on day nurseries and preventthe
development of unsatisfactory patterns of child care.
The plea for re-housing on medical grounds often comes from elderly people who live on upper
floors and who may be trapped there by their physical incapacity to manage the staircase. One cannot
but ask if it is really necessary that so many old people must live in this way. I recently carried out
a survey on a small portion of retired local government officers and found that no fewer than 40 per cent
of them had retired away from the London area to live in coastal towns or rural areas. If this practice
were more generally accepted, the shortage of housing accommodation in the metropolitan area might
be considerably relieved.
I hope to report next year on the progress which we are expecting to make in the mental health
services during 1968. The new approach to mental health is a major social advance, but one of the
less fortunate results of it is that a number of young women who in former days would have lived in
the sheltered world of a mental hospital are now embarking on family life, sometimes with unhappy
consequences for theirchildren. There is probably no more puzzling environment for a small child than
a home where the mother is even slightly mentally disturbed.
During the year, the department welcomed visitors from many countries to observe our varied
activities. Their stream of questions helps to keep us on our mettle. We were honoured by a visit from
the Deputy Minister of Health of the U.S.S.R., Mr. Danilov, and from him we were interested to learn
that most of the large cities in the U.S.S.R., like those of the U.S.A., have now added fluoride to their
drinking water so that their future inhabitants will enjoy better dental health.