CONSERVATIVES AND SLUM PROPERTY
[To the Editor of TILE SPECTATOR.] SIR,—Your paragraph on " Conservatives and Slum Pro- perties " seems to ignore certain defects in the working of the new Act which arc resulting in real hardship to many small owners of houses in conderimed areas, including those who have invested what are the savings of a lifetime in. the purchase of the house in which they live. Many of these houses arc certainly habitable, and even comfortable, in spite of the fact that they do not come up to requirements which would be insisted upon in the case of a house now being built. Where a house of this kind is condemned the owner has the right of appeal to the local authority but, as the latter has to provide any compensation, it can hardly approach the matter in a judicial spirit and with absolute impartiality. There remains an appeal to the Miniitry, which is also necessarily influenced by political and economic considerations. These appeals are costly to those. who have to make them and the only way of removing their grieVance would appear to be the setting up of an impartial tribunal simply to decide whether any particular property was or was not reasonably habitable.
Another grievance is that the tenants of a condemned area may have to go and live far away from their work and also to give up all their associations with the district in which often their whole lives have been spent. The churches, schools and other institutions in the locality are naturally also aggrieved at these compulsory migrations for similar reasons. The only way to meet this difficulty is to provide accommodation on the same site, which in many cases is not being done.
No one, as you rightly say, has much sympathy with owners of slum property who have bought it as an investment and failed to keep it in order. But, as I have already indicated, there is a class of small owner who is much to be pitied when the order comes that he is to pull his house &min and then receive only the site value for it.
The working of the Act will, therefore, be considerably hampered if these grievances are not recognized as apparently they were by those who voted at the recent Conservative Conference, not for the reasons you assigned, but for others which maybe did not Occur to you at the time of writing.—
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