BOOKS OF THE DAY
The Complete Builder
Rebuilding Britain- A Twenty Years Plan. By Sir Ernest Simon (Gollancz 6s.)
SIR ERNEST SlmoN is one of the leading Hous'ng and Town Planning reformers of his generation. He has compiled a comprehensive and interesting book, or rather books, as this work is divided into four parts.
Part I deals with building and is first-class, giving a comprehensive, factual picture of the situation in the building industry regarding man-power, materials, costs and technical progress. The writer's chairmanship of a Government Committee on Labcur in the Building Industry gives his remarks authority, and his facts are valuable. Perhaps he lavishes too much praise on the Portal bungalow (" famous," "magnificent"). He appears to have a blue fear of the House of Commons, rejoicing that Lord Portal, as a peer, was !removed from direct contact with the elected representatives of the people for whom the houses will be built. He proposes to dispose of democracy even further by handing many of the Minister of Works' functions to a Building Requisites Board, carefully insulated from Parliament. His scheme would give the Board power without responsibility, and the House of Commons responsibility without power ; a very unsatisfactory form of diarchy.
Part II entitled " Housing " gives a valuable history of inter-war building, which he sums up as "a fine national achievement. No other country has approached it." As to the future, Sir Ernest assumes, I think wrong:y, that a pre-fabricated house cannot be fully up to the standard of a permanent house ; and he envisages a programme of 7 million houses, which would involve replacing over half the houses in the country, and spending Lux) million of taxpayers' money a year in subsidies—an obviously disproportionate share of national resources and productive capacity available. As regards cost and output, he is pessimistic, and he does not appear to have read (as he never mentions it) the Report of the Ministry of Works Mission to America, led by Mr. Alfred Bossom, M.P. Sir Ernest Simon merely hopes that in a few years the output of labour may settle down to the same level as prevailed during the thirties. If this pessimistic prophecy were to prove true Britain would be saddled with an out-of-date and expensive building industry. There is, however, as the Bossom Report shows, the possibility of technical revolutions in the building industry which -will give lower costs, greater output and high wages. The correct programme may well be not the grandiose and expensive one Sir Ernest Simon envisages, but one of about 4 million houses, built more quickly, more efficiently, and requiring fewer men, and less staggering subsidies. He finishes this section by a comparison of private and Local Authority building, and had plumped for the latter, when the Pole Committee reported that the private builder should also have his chance, which has stirred Sir Ernest Simon to a very illiberal postscript.
Part III is entitled " Planning—Foreign Examples" and deals with Moscow, "The Planners' Paradise," the T.V.A., American, Swiss and Swedish experience, and again the writer has collected most useful facts. He retails, however, an "amusing instance" of the results of the "Planners' Paradise" when the British Ambassador received notice that the planners were raising the level of the Moscow River by 3 metres, and that the Ambassador's basements, where the three kitchens of the family, the Embassy staff and the domestic staff were situated, would shortly be flooded. That Sir Ernest Simon should consider " amusing " the flooding, without redress, compensation or alternative accommodation, of the basement of the already crowded house of one of England's most hard-worked representatives abroad, shows how Planning Power, like other power, corrupts even the judgement of a Manchester Liberal. The ordinary citizen, who is likely to be more planned against than planning, may be well advised to provide himself with safeguards against such " amusing " use of planning powers.
• In Section IV, "Planning Britain," he comes out for land nationalisation to facilitate planning as he appears to distrust the assurances given by the leaders of all three parties in the White Paper. He then examines the future of the roads and transport. It is unlikely, with the price of cars getting lower than ever before, that the public would accept the limitations of the development of private motoring which are here discussed. He draws on the experi- ence and example of Manchester for his chapters on municipal development, which are most valuable.
His final chapter on the Economic Background admits that such a programme as he envisages will call for "higher taxation than in the inter-war years, and out of the incomes diminished by paying this taxation the people will have to save each year and invest in capital goods a larger amount of money than they did previously " ; and that they will be rewarded for this by getting an even lower rate of interest on their savings. If England remains a free society, with some freedom of choice as to how the citizen spends his own money, such a programme is unlikely to appeal to the public.
The programme outlined in this book is really beyond the bounds of what will be possible. It is because it is put forward so per- suasively and with so many statistical tables that it has been necessary to examine it with a critical spirit. The author has helped all students of housing by the mass of- facts he has assembled, but a more modest programme would produce fewer illusions and less
Previous page
