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GRAND TOTAL £5,985 6s. 2d.
HOUSING
1920—1950
Good housing has long been recognised as an essential for
good health but local authorities have been faced with many
difficulties in trying to improve the housing conditions in their
districts. Earlier legislation, such as the Housing of the Working
Classes Acts, 1890-1903 and the Housing and Town Planning Act,
1909, although giving powers of inspection and "representation"
of unhealthy areas, offered no stimulation to local authorities to
deal with overcrowding and slum clearance on an adequate scale;
the difficulties were too enormous.
The service of notices to repair offered no way out of the problem
of unfit houses, for an owner who could show that reconstruction
was necessitated by a notice served under those Acts (although
there was no definition of "reconstruction") could cause the
premises to be closed. The effect of closing, however, was to cause
the inhabitants to seek accommodation at similar rents in other
parts of the borough, usually at the cost of overcrowding the premises
to which they moved whilst the vacated dwellings were
demolished and the sites used for industrial purposes.
It is true that there was the Public Health (London) Act,
1891, under which insanitary conditions could be dealt with either
by way of nuisance or closing orders, but action under this Act
was limited to individual insanitary occupied houses and there
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