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13
overcrowding or other circumstances which are not
shared by very many of the Council's other applicants.
All applicants for rehousing are visited by the sanitary
inspector before interview by the Housing Committee
and I am hopeful that these fact-finding inspections have
helped the Committee to assess those applicants with
the greatest need for rehousing.
The urgent need to house people who have no
accommodation of their own has rather overshadowed
the needs of persons occupying old, obsolescent and worn
out houses, but as I mentioned in the Annual Report for
1948, demolition orders were made in respect of eight
houses in that year and the occupants of these cottages
have now all been rehoused and the cottages demolished
and work has been commenced for dealing with a further
thirty cottages in a similar manner. During the
year a very limited survey was made of the houses likely
to require Housing Act action and a report was made to
the Public Health Committee with a view to obtaining a
rough estimate of the position appertaining to the
existing housing. The survey was however based principally
on local knowledge and its usefulness is strictly
limited. It was quite impossible to make a detailed
survey with existing staff.
One hundred and twenty-five samples of graded
milks were taken and submitted to the Public Health
Laboratory Service at Epsom. Of these seventeen failed,
although in respect of six samples taken on one occasion
the laboratory advised that the results should not be
taken loo seriously in view of prevailing temperature;
Of the seventeen failures, one was in respect of the
phosphalase 3 test, the others the methylene blue test.
The failures were distributed as follows:—
Pasteurised Milk 8. *T.T. (Past.) Milk 3.
South Devon (Past.) Milk 6.
The six failures referred to in previous paragraph were
all in respect of the methylene blue test and there were
two each from each grade.
*Tuberculin tested