View report page

50
houses being pulled down, and, in course of time, rebuilt on
improved lines, but at a very considerable financial cost to
ratepayers (compensation and otherwise). As a rule, all the
houses within a condemned area are closed and pulled down
—good, bad and indifferent, sanitarily. Further, such
action is officially and legally dilatory, and leads to inspectorial
neglect, with the result that dilapidated and insanitary
houses become more and more dilapidated and insanitary,
and matters pass from bad to worse. The London County
Council deals with large or small sized condemned areas
under Part I. of the 1890 Act, provided no such small sized
area contain 10 or less houses.
The latter course (i.e., condemning individual houses)
avoids the displacement of persons, and throws any financial
cost involved upon the owner or owners concerned. By this
method only really insanitary houses need be condemned.
Further, action in this way is officially and legally less dilatory
than in the former case, and has recently been rendered
more expeditious by the new amending Housing Act. The
Lambeth Borough Council deals with individual house condemnation
under Part II. of the 1890 Act, and is empowered
also, under the same part of the Act, to deal with a collection
of houses not exceeding 10 in number.
Individual house condemnation under the Housing Acts
has proved most satisfactory in Lambeth Borough for the
past 10 years, during which I have had the honour of being
Medical Officer of Health. Local knowledge of the amount
of congestion and crowding (whether of houses over areas,
or of persons in houses) has always made it desirable to
avoid, in Lambeth, the necessary wholesale displacing of
persons consequent upon the clearing of an area (large or
small). Such area condemnation simply tends, by the displacement
of persons, to increase the congestion or crowding
in other immediately neighbouring parts, and so to
create, by means of one Act of Parliament (the Housing
Act) serious nuisances, which it then becomes the duty of a
Sanitary Authority to abate by the powers invested in them
under another Act of Parliament (the Public Health Act).
Indeed, experience shews that, where an area (large or
small) is cleared on account of its so-called slumminess,
neighbouring properties, which were previously (considering
all things) passable, are apt to become rookeries, requiring,
in their turn, to be dealt with. It is common knowledge