Rents and Repairs
The first impact of the iiew Conservative approach to the problem of rents appears to have stunned the critics on both sides of the House. The only question which anyone has dared to ask is whether the rise in ,rents, now permitted for the first time since 1939, is going to be sufficient to keep seven million houses fit for habitation until they are no longer needed. The extreme Right would have preferred a bolder stroke, sweeping away the principle of rent control. Mr. Aneurin Bevan (but conspicuously not Mr. Morrison) would sweep the whole prob- lem away by nationalising all rent-restricted houses. But a large majority in the House of Commons—and, for that matter, in the country—do not think the time has come either for a return to the free play of market forces in a basic commodity such as housing, or for a revolution in the ownership of house property. Within these two extremes, the Government's White Paper has set a reasonable mean. Rents are to rise, but in direct and absolute relation to the increased cost of repairs; and where decay has gone beyond economic repair, the local authorities can now take over on a caretaker basis until they can afford to demolish and rebuild. The problem that the Government appear to have set themselves is to find some j way of reconciling the private ownership of houses with a lmoderate Welfare State. Their solution is neither final nor complete. Even for efficient landlords, working on a large and potentially profitable scale, it will be a tight squeeze to I keep the normal house in good repair and still to make a ' commercial profit. (About £18 a year is all that will be I allowed for repairs on the average house involved.) For the inefficient landlord, the small-scale speculator or the elderly lady who was left a bit of property, it may well be impossible. But if the new proposals will not meet every case, they do at least provide a fair basis for finding out how many cases , are quite insoluble within the present framework of private ownership and rent control. When the answer is found to ' that there will be bigger problems to be faced.
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