TOPICS OF THE DAY.
THE HOUSING IMBROGLIO.
T would be difficult to imagine anything more unsatisfactory than the Government's new Housing Scheme —propounded in the House of Commons on Monday—for new scheme it is, theugh it professes only to be an amend /ilea of the old. Equally disappointing was the debate. It showed with an intensity positively appalling the sterility' and confusion of mind from which the Government are suffering, and exhibited their total inability to produce either houses or even workable paper schemes for the construction of houses.
Dr. Addison is, we are sure, most anxious to give the country the hobses it needs so solely, but his speech showed that he and his Department, and indeed the whole Government, have really no plan which promises any p` duct but words. In fact, if we read between the lines of the speech we find something worse. In spite of brave words, the Government are at heart almost as hopeless as their severest critics. Can one wonder that they should be hopeless when one considers the appalling tangle into which the question has drifted ? The prospect was bad en4gh a year ago. It is far worse now, for the ground is encumbered with the wreckage of two or three old schemes. The Government when they find one scheme impracticable do not clear the ground and start afresh. They simply dump the new scheme on to the ruins of the old, just as they did in the case of the shipyards at Chepstow. There, as the investigators' Report showed, lines of trains and trucks, and even huge cranes, disappeared in a vast tumult of goods which were hurled pell-mell upon a site unprepared to receive them. So busy were the authorities with schemes for docks and other plant to produce ships that they ended by producing nothing. " May the omen be absent!" is ofir fervent prayer; but if the nation is not hopelessly depressed, its optimism can only be described as the triumph of hope over experience. For ourselves, we fear that it is once more a case of " Nothing can of nothing come." The Government scheme, though it looks so large, is really nothing but a chimera booming in the illimitable inane.
Dr. Addison's account of how the present impasse was reached was one of the most discouraging things that we have ever read. He met the plea that the State ought directly to undertake the wholesale building of houses by in effect declaring that the State could not engage in the business of rent-collecting. That may be, and probably is, a fatal objection ' • but how did Dr. Addison answer it ? He dealt with it as did Mark Twain when an awkward question was put to him about his Damp Abroad. " I couldn't tell a lie, so I told Harris to." (Harris was his agent.) The Government " funked " building houses themselves, so they told their agents to build them—i.e., called in the Local Authorities. Could there be a more amazing example of a delusion which we admit often takes possession of private people ? They realize that it would be most unwise for them to do a certain thing themselves, but somehow they think they will get out of their difficulties by appointing an agent to do it for them, quite forgetting that he who acts through an agent is acting himself. The Local Authorities are not private or independent entities. They are just as much the State as are the Government. They are only the State under an alias. Their action is limited by very much the same conditions as Government action, and the responsibilities that they incur are in the last resort the same responsibilities as those incurred by the Central Executive. The onl' difference's that are have many incurrers of responsibility instead of dne. The aggregate of responsibility is not in the least diminished. On the contrary, the pecuniary responsibility is always in danger of being increased, especially when, as so often happens, the Government give a subsidy to stimulate the action of the Local Authorities. In such instances the pecuniary burden undertaken is apt to be enormously inflated. The Government's Housing Scheme affords a capital example of our contention. This is how the inflation occurred. As soon as the Local Authorities digested the GovernMent Housing Scheme, they saw, or thought they saw, that it would not be to their advantages but the reverse,,, to insist on economical systems of building. The Government, in the first instance at any rate, were going to stand the whole racket beyond the unimportant penny rate. " Therefore," consciously or unconsciously argued the Local Authorities, " what will be lest for our town or district will be to have really good, handsome, important, expensive houses put up, something that will last and be a credit to the locality. None of your cheap jerrybuildings, log-shanties, or mud huts, such as the Government themselves condemn as cheap and nasty."
Accordingly in almost all the new schemes put forward by the Local Authorities it will be found that real economy has not been considered. Instead, what the Local Authorities would no doubt describe as " thoroughly good, sound brick or stone buildings with really permanent roofs of the best quality " have been the desiderata. Every private individual who has ever built a house knows what that means. It means extravagance beyond bounds. Here is an example of what we mean when we say that the Government, by excusing themselves• from direct building, and by telling their agents (or shall we say their partners in administration ?) to build houses, have not only failed to avoid the extravagance of Government work, but have actually intensified it.
No wonder then that when the Central Government began to look into the housing proposals under the new scheme they found that they were absolutely intolerable on the financial side. All over the country the Local Authorities were proposing to build at sensational priCes. Even rural labourers' cottages were suggested at £80) 'to £1,000 each. In one case, indeed, the estimates are said to have reached £1,200 for a labourer's house. Is it to be wondered at that in face of such a system local people with money to invest liked not the security and refused to lend their money ? Though it may seem at first strange to say so, that unwillingness of the local investors to lend has been our salvation, for it forced the Goverment to see the Niagara over which they were preparing to steer the ship of State. It made them realize that the Government cannot escape the responsibilities of direct action by putting the responsibility on to Local Authorities and pretending that they can do what the Central Government own they cannot do--i.e., build cheaply or quickly.
Dr. Addison's speech went on to say in effect, though of course not in words, that when the Government found that the Local Authorities could not work their scheme except on paper they realized the necessity of a fresh departure, and, as reasonable people always felt must be the case, they came to the conclusion that the proper way to build houses was to endeavour to set to work those who had been accustomed to build houses in the past. The Local Authorities having failed them, though that of course was not and could not be publicly admitted, they determined to call in that much-abused man, the local builder. Hence the new and very complicated temporary and local scheme for inducing the building trade to build houses— the inducement being a Government subsidy. One would have thought, after all that has happened, that the Minister and Department responsible for house construction would, warned by experience, have at any rate produced a simple and adequate if necessarily expensive scheme. Not a bit of it. They have produced a scheme elaborate, confused, and financially inadequate, a scheme which we fear will invigorate no one, the kind of scheme that the man timid in regard to expenditure, as all people are now becoming, will feel to be an impossible alternative to the great temptation of the hour—that is, to sit tight, wait and see, and for the moment embark as little . on expensive enterprises as possible. We are the last people to want reckless Government expenditure, but we greatly fear that the £150 will not prove to be the carrot in front of the District Council donkey which it is admittedly designed to be. When will Governments learn the wisdom of the chapter in The Wrong Box headed " The Underpaid Accomplice " ? If you engage an accomplice who is necessarily and by the nature of things somewhat unwilling, it is madness to underpay him. If you bribe, and the Government in effect tell us that they must bribe the builders to get to work, then, in the name of all that is sane, bribe adequately and not inadequately. It is.disageeeable ei .inatter.sia desperately,important as housing merely to pick holes in the Government scheme and to suggest nothing creative or remedial. Once more, therefore, we feel it incumbent upon us to set forth how in our opinion the Government should have met their problem —a problem, we fully admit, of an exceedingly difficult kind. Surely they should have begun by saying : The need of the hour is cheap houses, though of course good and sanitary and well-planned houses. How are we to get them ? Not by juggling with finance and pretending that by dividing the financial responsibility between Government and the Local Authorities the nation is somehow going to benefit; not by any schemes of controlling material or of bribing the building trade, but solely by cheap construction. But how is cheap construction to be obtained ? Certainly not by attempting to cut down wages. How then ? " The first step on the road towards cheap construction is to ask why construction is dear. It is dear because of three things. First, all the materials hitherto used, bricks, stone, wood, tiles, slate, cement, plaster, and iron, are dear, and dear through shortage and increased demand. Construction is also dear because there is a great shortage of skilled labour, or what is called skilled labour ; that is, the men who have hitherto enjoyed a monopoly in the handling of bricks, stone, tiles, slate, floors, rafters, and all wooden building material—i.e., bricklayers, masons, carpenters, joiners, and plasterers. Finally, construction is dear because of the enormous cost of, and difficulty and delay in, transport. That being so, the Government when in quest of cheap houses should have said : "In this great emergency we must make a new departure. We must find, even if it is not the best system of building, some system in which the old building materials just named will not be needed. We must then find (1) a substitute for the old materials ; (2) a material which is cheap and in effect universal ; (3) a material which can be handled by unskilled workers, and does not require, or is not supposed to require, the mysteries of the bricklayer, mason, carpenter, joiner, and plasterer ; (4) a material that as far as possible does not demand transport."
If the Government had arrived at this stage and argued in this way, they would at any rate have known the kind of system of construction to look out for. If they had gone a step further, they would, we believe, have found the various systems of earth building for house walls which survive throughout the world in the present day. In the past these constituted the reigning forms of construction, for in primitive times the conditions, economic and otherwise, were very much as they are now. Unfortunately it never seems to have occurred to the Cabinet to approach the question in this way; i.c.,to investigate the problem of cheap construction—an investigation, remember, which need not have taken more than three or four months at the most if the proper investigators had been chosen. Instead, . the Government thought it wise, as in the debate, to pour contempt upon the only two serious efforts that have been made to help cheap construction—the proposals of the Daily Mail in regard to wooden houses, and out proposals in regard to construction in Pig de Terre. Bath these proposals (we hope we shall not be thought Pecksniffian if we say) should not have come from newspapers, whose essential business is criticism and not construction, but from the Government Departments charged with the business of housing the nation.
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