The housing statistics are now awaited and scanned with almost
as much interest as the racing and football results and with equally small satisfaction to those who have a material interest in the issue. The number of families rehoused, which is the best ready-made index of progress in human terms, amounted to ro,600 in February—less than the average for the previous ten months. The attempt to measure progress in a more scientific manner is no more productive of reassuring results. It used to be said that housing would have to be tackled in the spirit of a military operation. What can be said of a military operation which has no fixed objective, no control of the forces engaged, inadequate equipment and no preparation in the form of a " tooling up " stage? Nothing, except that it will almost certainly fail. Yet all these essential elements are missing from the present housing programme. The fact that there is no quantitative programme is excused on the ground that it would serve no purpose except to provide the Opposition with a stick with which to beat the Government. The triumphs of planning in the war, in particular in the sphere of aircraft production, make nonsense of this. The real argument is that if you are to plan you must control the productive process, and the Government has no effective control of building. The extremely wasteful use of labour on bomb-damage repairs, and the prevalence of black-market building activity are proofs of this. Even more telling is the disclosure that the produc- tion of building materials in general and bricks in particular is out of line with immediate requirements. In other words the necessity for a " tooling up " stage has been forgotten altogether. The one hope that the present woefully small figures of houses completed are merely a prelude to an enormous spate of building in a few months' time is removed. The mistakes of the Coalition Government cannot excuse this. Nor can a miscellaneous crop of small measures, such as the introduction of heavier penalties for illegal building and an expanded educational programme for building craftsmen, do much to help. If the Government is going to plan housing it must do it thoroughly or not at all. Possibly a good first step would be to relieve the Minister of Health, whose energy and ability are not in doubt, of the impossible double burden of housing and the health services.
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