Housing All Wrong
The pronouncements of the Conservative Party during the General Election and the actions of the Conservative Govern- ment since the election have all accorded to housing a high and special place in the list of national priorities. This has resulted in a slight increase in the number of houses completed and under construction. But nobody can derive much satis- faction or credit from that, for the simple reason that housing policy is in a tangle and the building industry in a slough of cross-purposes and inefficiency. That such confusion should reign at the heart of a subject to which the Government apparently attaches such capital importance is a sufficiently serious fact to warrant some pretty searching re-examination of policy. But there was little in last week's debate in the Commons or this week's debate in the Lords on the Housing Bill to indicate that anything of the kind is going on. Lord Woolton was able to give a full and clear account of how the housing subsidy is made up, but he did not explain why it is going up when food subsidies are coming down, why it is so high as to inflate and distort the demand for new houses, why the balance is so heavily weighted in favour of new building as against repair and maintenance work, and why there is no official attempt to end the contradictions of rent control where- by existing houses are allowed to fall down faster than the new ones can go up. A little clear thinking at the highest level could well produce a much greater effect in terms of homes available than all the millions that are being poured out in subsidies. That would at least clear the path to a wider attack on the housing problem.
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