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habitation and the Authority is not carrying out its obligations as a sanitary
authority. On the other hand, if nothing is done and the houses should
become unoccupied, they are lost as housing units—and yet these are houses
which it is not felt can be said to-day cannot be repaired at a reasonable
expense. If they are allowed to go, they only add to the other list of those
for whom the Council would be looked to to provide housing. It is felt
that, just as to-day there are houses which, although suffering from real
defects, cannot be demolished because the district cannot afford to lose them
as housing units, so every consideration should be given to the means by
which these other houses can remain available. It might well be that it
will cost the Council an expenditure which it can never recover. Such
expenditure, however, would by delaying the time before such families have
to be housed by the Council, enable some others who so badly need it, to be
satisfactorily housed.
B. Families with a Member Suffering from Tuberculosis.
1. For some years the Council has continued its policy of allotting for
the rehousing of families having a member suffering from open tuberculosis
one-sixth of the new houses which become available.
2. This means that the rate at which such families have been rehoused
has depended not on the needs of the individual families, but on the rate at
which new houses have been erected. For this reason, then, the figures about
the numbers of families rehoused in the past years cannot in themselves be
accepted as a guide to future needs.
3. The cases which are added to the department's list of such families
are but a fraction of those families in the district which have a member
suffering from tuberculosis (at the end of 1950 there were on the tuberculosis
register the names of 2,876 persons suffering from pulmonary tuberculosis
and 269 suffering from non-pulmonary tuberculosis). The vast majority
come to notice on representations made by the staff of the tuberculosis
service. The two chief factors which lead to these families being considered
for rehousing are the infectiousness of the patient and the degree of overcrowding
of the accommodation the family occupies.

It will be seen that the number of new cases in each year has in most
years been greater than the number of cases lost in that year, so that numerically
there has not been much improvement in the position. In point of
fact, though, the situation is to-day very much more satisfactory than it
was in the earlier of these years as those families most urgently needing to
be rehoused have been found other accommodation.