Law of Very Little Brain
I HAVE developed a fellow-feeling for Winnie the Pooh, who lived under the name of Sanders. The house at Pooh Corner had Pooh inside it but SANDERS in large letters over the door. I now assume that his Corner had come within the scope of the Rent Acts. My house is temporarily out of commission (Owl had the same trouble) and I have moved round the Corner, where I am living under the name of a limited liability company in the cotton trade. I have to. If, instead of assuming this corporate personality, I had sought to be a tenant in my own name, I should never have got through the door. I would at once have acquired all sorts of rights, about paying and about staying. A company only has the rights which are written into its contract. The landlord, therefore, as a matter of policy only lets to companies and so, I found, did all the landlords into whose houses or flats I might have moved. I thought it an elegant example of how the law frustrates the market in housing, and prevents willing landlords and willing tenants from striking the agreements which both of them want. If the would-be tenant has no company' to wrap around him, where should he turn for help? To some agency, perhaps, which would supply a list of places to live and landlords willing to let? The agency, if it charged for the list, would be breaking the law. The Acconi- modation Agencies Act, 1953, confines the business of house-finding to terms which, on stud-farms, are called 'No foal, no fee.' It is illegal to charge people for finding a place to live until they have entered into a contract to live there. I suppose that in 1953 everyone was supposed to sit dumbly on the council waiting list until Harold Macmillan had finished building his vaunted 300,000 houses. This officious denial of information, though, is enforced to the present day, under a government which thinks it is trying to open up the market in housing. First the law stands between demand and supply and creates an artificial shortage, then the shortage puts informa- tion at a premium, then the law strikes again. A Bear of Very Little Brain would see what is wrong with that.
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