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sheer inability to carry out the necessary repairs; and, indeed, in
many instances it is owner/occupiers who have sub-let and are in
monetary difficulties who throw back upon the Borough Council
the responsibility of enforcing repairs.
A comparison of the number of Intimation Notices with
Statutory Notices still shows that by far the great majority of
owners and agents carry out work on the Intimation Notice, and
even though many of them wait for the Statutory Notice it by no
means follows that there is any real reluctance to carry out the
work. So far as agents are concerned, in many cases they are
unable to get authority from the owners to expend money on repairs
until the Statutory Notice is served.
Under normal conditions, the number of summonses is a good
index of owners attempting to evade their responsibilities, but
since the war this number has risen to alarming proportions because
the cost of repairs has increased so enormously and now bears
no relationship to existing rents. In many instances proceedings
are taken for the purpose of obtaining a Magistrate's Order preparatory
to the Council carrying out the work on behalf of the
owner.
It is with some bitterness that one reflects on the truth of the
saying "history repeats itself," for such has been the experience
during the past 30 years as far as sanitary inspection has been
concerned, although the years after the 1939-1945 war have been
infinitely worse than were those following the 1914-1918 war.
Serious as the present conditions are, they would be even more
so but for the work of the sanitary inspectors, and the following
quotation from my Annual Report of 1922 sums up the present
position with perhaps even greater truth than it did then. In
my report for that year I wrote
"the work of the sanitary inspectors in
ameliorating the conditions arising from the housing shortage
cannot be overestimated. If these services were inefficient,
choked and broken drains, leaky roofs, minor sanitary defects
accumulating, adulteration and the sale of unsound food
remaining unchecked, immediate disinfection and other measures
against infectious disease ceasing, and all the manifold
activities of the Public Health Department not being promptly
carried out, the full effects of the housing difficulty would then
be experienced. The extent to which the careful work of the
sanitary inspectors and the staff of the department neutralise
the ill-effects of overcrowding is not realised."
That sanitary inspection, in spite of all difficulties, has been
carried out with some success is shown by the fact that Hackney is
one of the seven London boroughs who, in the opinion of the London
County Council, have less than 100 houses in such a condition that
they need to be demolished as slum houses during the next five-year