Houses For All By 1961 How to Abolish the Slums.
By E. D. Simon. (Longmans.
4s. 6d.) •
ANYONE who knows anything of housing problems will be able to,guesS the name of the Scottish town " noted for the beauty of its site and the squalor of its slums '" to which Mr. Simon alludes in his preface. Contemplating such misery and degradation he echoes words we have often used: " when one considers the waste of good human material in letting children grow up in such conditions, one is driven to feel that this disgrace to our civilization must be swept away whatever it may cost to do so." He goes on to say, "tf we set our minds to it we can completely abolish our slums in a generation and the cost to the country will not be prohibitive." We may be forgiven for italicizing a statement by an expert that is so full of hope and that coincides so closely with what we have been saying for so long in the Spectator.
Can we summarize Mr. Simon's proposals ? This is • a necessarily rough attempt to condense a book that is already packed and pressed down with facts, information, ideas. In order to house our people decently we must (a) build at the rate of two hundred thousand new houses a year for at least the next twenty years, slowing down after 1950 to whatever number of houses is required to provide for steady replacement ; (b) adopt a derating scheme (which could be an extension of the present measure introduced by the Government) having as its principal object the lightening of the assessment on houses with a net rent of from Os. to 10s. a week ; (c) give subsidies to very poor families based on the needs of the family, rather than on the type of house it happens to occupy, i.e., give a rent allowance of, say, Is. a week a child.
" Frankly, this outcry against the principle of subsidies is all nonsense," Mr. Simon writes, and we agree. The country has long since made up its mind that the needs of the children must be satisfied. Our oldest Universities are heavily sub- sidized, yet nobody talks about a Balliol man as suffering from the stigma of pauperism. All education is subsidized —and what is the use of any education to a child who lives in a damp dark basement with six brothers and sisters ? We are wasting money on schools and hospitals unless we house our poor. decently. The only question is, how shall the sul3sidies be given ? With regard to. proposal (b) for rate-relief, the matter is too technical to discuss at length, but Mr. Simon makes out a very strong case when he shows that a rich man living in a big house is taxed at about 1 per cent. of his income ; a poor man, father of a family and living in a slum, pays 5 per cent. of his income ; while the same poor father, if he lives in a decent modern house, even though it is the smallest and cheapest in which he can bring up his family properly, pays rates equivalent to about 10 per cent. of his income. To lighten the weight of these unjust burdens (to a certain extent they are inevitable as long as to him that hath shall be given) will cost the country £20,000,000, but " the scale could be so adapted as to reduce the cost to not more than £10,000,000 and yet to include the essential thing—the full reduction in the rates of the standard minimum house.
Let us now glance at (c)—the suggested children's rent allowance. It is, of course, a commonplace of housing that there is not enough accommodation for our, poorer families at rents that they can afford to pay.. About one-half of the new houses to be built must be let (if we would help the classes most.in need) at a rent of under 10s. a week. The position with regard to our slums, in spite of the good work. of Mr. Neville Chamberlain, is little better than it was at the Armistice, for the million houses that have been built have gone to accommodate not the very poor but slightly more prosperous people, who can pay rents of 15s. a week. We are now rapidly approaching the end of the demand for house's of this type and there will be a slump and unemploy- ment in the building trade unless we take time by the forelock and begin to make it possible to build houses which can be let to our poorest families. A children's rent allowance of ls. a week per child would 'be a quite new-principle in housing subsidies, but it. is exactly the principle which is applied as regards education, and we' see no reason why it should not work satisfactorily; although the 'proposal needs- thorough consideration and far more discussion that we are able to give it here. A three-child family, by means of such an allowance, could afford the modern respectable " minimum- standard " house letting at los. a week if the wage-earner had only to pay the 7s. a week he is giving his slum landlord to-day.
To come finally to (a)—Mr. Simon's demand that we should continue building at the rate of two hundred thousand house& a year. If our 'present building campaign- is vigorously continued (last year it showed signs of slackening) he calculatei that by 1931 we shall " have done just a little more than clearing off the arrears and meeting the needs of the increase of population." We shall, in short, have one house per family in 1931, and be all right, therefore, as to quantity,
although still woefully deficient in quality. In 1981 we shall for the first tithe be able to undertake slum clearance on a large scale, moving 150,000 families into decent surroundings every year. (The other 50,000 houses will be for the natural increase in population, although there are now signs that this is reaching stabilization.) By 1941 we shall have cleared out all the really bad sloths. By 1961 we shall have demolished 5,000,000 existing houses and of the 11,000,000 houses standing in that year only the best 4,000,000 built since 1918 will be in existence. Slums will have disappeared: There is no reason, either in Mr. Simon's opinion or in ours, why this happy state of affairs should not come to pass.
With regard to overcrowding, Mr. Simon gives some important figures, proving beyond any doubt that the Registrar-General's standard for overcrowding does not reveal the true state of congestion in our cities. Yet even on his figures, there were three and a half millions of us in 1921 living too closely packed in England and Wales. Our article of October 20th last on " The Human Sardines of Shoreditch " is alluded to in a statement showing that in that borough the appalling figure of 32 per cent. of the population is overcrowded.
We have a million families in our urban districts who cannot afford to pay the rent of a " standard-minimum " house and yet provide their children with the barest physical necessities. What are we going to do about it ? We cannot leave these people in their wretchedness. Subsidies of some kind there must be for at least another generation, if we would move them into decent surroundings at the first practicable opportunity. Once lodged in decent houses, if they fail to make good (that some will fail—possibly even 10 per cent. of them—is a possibility that we should face boldly and with no particular surprise) then measures of segregation and special supervision can be applied to the residuum of incorrigible slum-makers without offence to the clean and respectable majority. That such a class of hopeless adults exists it would be foolish to deny. But. it would be equally foolish to believe that me can separate the degenerates from the unfortunates when all together arc plunged in the morass of slumland.
In a• very recent report the Scottish Board of Health finds that out of 350 new houses." the proportion of really bad tenants does not exceed 12 per cent." Out of 850 houses visited, their inspector found 62 per cent. well kept, 26 per cent. fairly clean and 12 per cent. very dirty. But as Mr. Simon observes, ".the conditions. under which many slum dwellers have had to struggle are such that it is no wonder they have given up hope and become content with dirt and disorder. . . . To delay our great schemes for the improvement of the housing of the people on account of any Improved theory that slums must always be with us would be criminal folly." .
While thoroughly agreeing with Mr. Simon's attitude towards the housing problem, we cannot see eye-to-eye with Lim about the present necessity for a Royal Commission. The steam of public opinion is steadily mounting in the pressure-gauges of reform. The wheels of progress will begin to turn without any committee meetings : what we need are good engineers to look ahead, as Mr. Simon has done, with clear eyes,_courage, financial skill and again courage.
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