VIEWS OF THE WEEK
Homes and Slums
AMID the high feelings over mortgage rates and the inadequacies of the building in- dustry (as attacked on Wednesday in a formid- able report in Which?) another housing problem deserves attention. The Government should give sympathetic treatment to Mr. Harold Garden's' Bill to alter the basis of compensation payable where property is acquired under slum-clearance schemes. There is no doubt that, under the present law, grave injustice is done to individuals. If a house is designated a slum, the owner is paid only the site value: this rarely amounts to more than £100 and may sometimes be as low as £1. The theory behind this system of evaluation was suc- cinctly, if crudely, put by a pre-war Labour Minister as, 'You don't pay good money for rotten meat.
It is a fallacious theory. Houses which are officially slums do in reality have a market value well above their site value. For instance, if a house has been declared part of a clearance area it may still change hands for (say) £300: if it has not been scheduled, a house may fetch as much as £2,000. It may be objected that, in the former case, the owner-occupier has only him- self to blame. This argument ignores the realities and it ignores the housing shortage. It also ignores the fact that people frequently do not take the best advice before buying a house. And, in the case where a house is declared a slum after it has ,been bought or inherited, the owner is completely blameless: he is deprived of a capital asset which he thought was his, and will in future have to pay rent.
Thisis not all. The criteria used in determining whether a house is a slum are not only out-of- date (the absence of a larder, for instance, is a factor taken into .account, even though many modern houses do not have larders); they are also applied in a haphazard way from authority to authority. The people who are hurt by the present rules of compensation arc generally the poor and the elderly. Certain authorities seem to go out of their way to act in a high-handed and tyrannical fashion. Birmingham- is one ex- ample: it is significant that Mr. Gurden' repre- sents a Birmingham constituency. Bristol is another : Mr. William Wilkins, the MP for South Bristol, vainly tried to get the last Government to do something about compensation.
At Liverpool, on October 13, Mr. Wilson gave a little-noticed pledge that a Labour government would amend the law on this subject. We may therefore assume that, if the Government does not actively support Mr. Gurden's Bill, it will shortly bring in a Bill of its own on similar lines.
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