THE RURAL COTTAGE PROBLEM.
[To THY EDITOR OF THE "SPECTATOR.")
Sin,—Mr. Harold Cox may have solved the problem at Leigh. I hope he has, but I doubt it. As chairman of a Rural District Council Housing Committee for the very district of which Leigh is part, I have had to deal directly with the problem, and my Council is about to erect cottages, if the Local Government Board approves, in the next parish to Leigh, which at rentals of 4e. to 4s. 6d. a week will show an almost exact balance at the start if they are all let, as they will be, but no margin. So far, perhaps, so good, but the exact balance allows too little for repairs after the cottages cease to be new, and most of the calculations that I have seen fail to realize that after the first ten years of the life of even a well-built cottage—and I am not dealing with the others—the necessary periodical repairs absorb a very large proportion of the annual income.
I do not think that any experienced landowner or agent will dispute this. Personally, I consider it something of an achievement to pay a dividend on cottages let at 4s. 6d. a week, but most landowners would be willing to build cottages if they could be sure of 4s. a week rent, and would be gratified if they showed no loss for a period of ten years ; but then they cannot get 48. a week or anything like it in most places, and even if they can, the sum is more than an agricultural labourer ought to pay.
For the half-dozen cottages that my council is prepared to build, fourteen applicants have come forward to say that they will pay 4e. to 4s. 6d. a week, but of these thirteen are engaged in a local industry which has its works within a couple of hundred yards of the selected site, and the other is employed on the railway close at hand. Not one is an agricultural labourer. The council will therefore in reality be financing the local industry.
It is true that in another adjoining parish a few cottages have been built by the local authority, which, at similar rents, show annually a negligible charge on the ratepayers, but in this case no serious expense for repairs has as yet been incurred, and, thanks to the devotion of the lady to whose enthusiasm the building of the cottages is due, no expense for the collection of rents is at present involved; but until it can be proved that cottages can be built and maintained at rentals of 3s. a week, or less, which is as much as an agricultural labourer can really afford, I for one cannot consider the problem to have been solved.
I do not know what provision is made for repairs at Leigh, but Mr. Cox is too good an economist to have fallen into the almost universal error of under-estimating this burden. It is, however, not quite safe, I fear, to take Leigh as a typical rural parish, as it lies too near to the considerable town of Tonbridge to be accepted as a standard, and agricultural wages are higher in that part of Kent than in many other parts of the county, to say nothing of Essex, Hampshire, Dorset, and, doubtless, other counties of which I have no personal or professional knowledge.—I am, Sir, &c., Claydene, Edenbridge, Kent. GuT Ewma.
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