XII. Housing

The housing question isa vast medley of false facts, muddled thinking and political chicanery. In discussing the housing problem, therefore, it is desirable first of all to deal with some wholly false notions which seem to have fastened themselves up on the public mind. The first of these is that which deals with the first appearance of a slum. Itis all too commonly supposed that in the days when the fac tories were appearing in the towns a class of person, not at all clearly defined, set out of evil purpose to build houses of inferior materials and unhealthy design, and that the workers, in some way which is never explained, were forced into .these hovels by the same evil persons. Surely nothing could be farther from the truth. The houses which we of the twentieth century, with our greater knowledge, now regard as inadequate and call slums were, at .the moment of their build ing, literally palaces to the people who occupied them. The builders of a hundred or seventy or fifty years ago built, just as we do to-day, in the very best way that was possible, having regard to the 137 138 The Return to Laisser Faire materials and the labour and the knowledge avail able. These houses, when built, very naturally attracted large numbers of poor people living in conditions of indescribable hardship on the land.

If the serious student of this point in the problem will take the trouble to make a tour of Ireland or Brittany and get a true conception of agricultural conditions such as existed in our own cO-untryin the past, he will not wonder that the people flocked eagerly from such conditions to the far superior comfort of what are now slums. Another false notion commonly held by the public which must be dispelled before this problem can be right! y understood is that the housing question can be answered with money. It should not be neces sary to argue this point at any length after our experience of the last ten years. Since 1918, Governments and local authorities have been busy building working-class houses more or less of a pat tern, and the price of the same sort of house in this short period has varied between £ 1,200 and £ 375, the fact being, as I shall show presently, that the supply of houses is a fixed quantity and that no amount of money will alter that quantity. The ex perience of the London County Council gives point to the argument. The cost of their housing schemes before the war was £ 43 per person housed. Post war houses of pre-war design have cost £'137 per person housed.

A misconception which it will be more difficult to remove from the public mind is the theory that officials help. Many an election is won by the canHousing 139 didate who will promise to strengthen the housing department of some local authority, the idea being that more money and more officials would produce more houses. It is, of course, necessary that any building effort should be under some sort of control. There must be a standard, and the machinery must exist for enforcing that standard. But it should be understood that the workings or effect of all such machinery must always be in the nature of hindrance or restraint to building. Ministries of Health, local authorities and hous ing officials are necessary evils and not, as is com monly supposed, public blessings. The man in the street has some strange conception of a housing official as a sort of commercial traveller pushing and promoting the housing business, whereas, of course, he is more in the nature of a policeman holding up the traffic.

My personal experience of building fully confirms this view. Twenty years ago I put up an office building in Christopher Street, Finsbury, and was forced by the local authorities to devote one-third of the whole of the floor space of the building to staircasesand a system of double doors which, I be lieve, has now become obsolete. However that may be, the building proved altogether useless for any serious purpose and three or four years later I had to abandon it at considerable loss. Within the last few years I have erected a big building in Fleet Street, planned by one of the foremost architects, and have been hampered at every turn by the neces sityof submitting every detail to officials, none of 140 The Return to Laisset Faire whom could claim to be so well qualified as the archi tect who has to bow to their decisions. My build ing, for instance, is very superior in many respects to the standard laid down by the London Building Act, but its erection was delayed seven weeks, while I paid £ 70 a week ground rent, before the City and the County and the national authorities could make up their minds to give me permission to put in a much stronger foundation than the Act re quired. A similar experience befell me when build ing. a workman' scottage in the country. I desired to dispense with the outside w.c., believing,surely rightly, that even a workman might be spared the necessity oigoing out into the rain in the middle of the night. On one occasion there were four official motor cars standing outside that half-built cottage, while the builders stood idle, .and the architect, a distinguished Fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, wasted his time trying to convince bureaucrats that his plan could be approved without a·breach of their precious regulations. A more re cent experience· still is in connection with Bentham Cottages, Oxted, three small houses that I put up for the use of my staff. Seeing that the Chamber lain subsidy of £ 70 per cottage has increased the price of cottages by £ 70 apiece, I felt myself to be justified in applying for the subsidy. The officials and committees concerned followed their usual leisurely procedure and after weeks of arguments and delay, gave me a licence to build with the sub sidy. The licence arrived in the last week in March.

It was smothered with conditions couched in official Housing 141 language, the first of which required that building should begin on April 1st and end on September 30th. In that case I persuaded a builder, who had been invited to tender, to dump on the site a load of bricks-which were not, as it happened, suitable for the job-. on the morning of April 1st, and thus conformed for official purposes to the first require ment of the licence. When September 30th arrived the buildings were not, of course, completed, and a further application had to be made to the same officials, who were good enough to grant a further extension of time with further wordy conditions. Not only does the restraint of building by officials operate to annoy. the builder, the owner and the tenant, but the ever-growing number of officials de lay one another. The Lord Chief Justice, in delivering judgment in an absurd action between the King and the Minister of Health, gave a suc cinct illustration of this very point: " The order was made in February; it is now June 9th.

The Ministry of Health is in London, the garden is at Hammersmith-in London; yet between February and June they cannot discover whether this is a garden or not, and cannot save all this expense and waste of time. I recognise fully that a Government department, and you, Mr. Solicitor General, as a Law Officer, are bound to use care to see that things are done regularly, but there is absolutely nothing in this case now except costs. It must stand over until Monday. Meanwhile, you and Mr. Montgomery can probably agree whether this is a garden, and mention it to the Court.)) In December, 1920, Mr. Stephen Easten, Presi dent of the Builders' Federation, resigned his posi tion as Director of Production in Housing at the Ministry of Health, because he could not stand the 142 The Return to Laisser Faire inter-departmental muddli~g and squabbling, the flouting of expert advice by the Ministry's own advisers, the continual contest between the Cabinet and the Minister as to which should offer the largest bribe to the Trade Unions concerned, and because of his objection to the wastefulness of the system as a whole.

By way of a third illustration, also from official evidence, the statement of the Surveyor to the Chertsey Rural Council on July 29th, 1919, may be quoted: . ,'We have· done all we can to push matters on, and if we had had a free hand we should have had SOlne houses ready for letting now. Instead of that we are hampered in every direction by an army of officials who are not helping but opposing housing right and left." The Council had decided to purchase a site for twelve cottages for ,£ 225. The price was con sidered by the Council to be very moderate, and tenders were invited and one accepted. Everything was proceeding satisfactorily, when the District Valuer stopped the whole scheme by valuing the land at. a lower figure. Illustrations of this kind could be multiplied in definitely, but the above are perhaps sufficient to make the simple point that officialdom may be a necessary evil but it does not promote the supply of houses.

There is another general consideration which may usefully be examined. Why should it be right or proper to house the working classes at all? Ever since the days of Lord Shaftesbury every Parliament Housing 143 has passed one or more Acts to provide for the " housing of the working classes," and the notion has sunk deep into the public mind that something special in the housing way should be done for those who are known as the working classes. Surely the absurdity of this method of thought becomes apparent as soon as it is mentioned. It is first of all assumed that there will, for all time, be an individual known as the workingman, who will require a certain minimum standard down to which it is necessary for us to build. May it not be that this way of looking at the problem has of itself pro duced a good proportion of our present troubles, and, if it continues, will surely produce much greater trouble in the future? What, for instance, is going to happen in twenty years' time when every working man possesses something in the nature of a motor-car?

All the £1,200 houses built by Dr. Addison will be worse than useless. This way of putting the question is not so unreasonable as it might appear when we remember what has actually happened in the last forty years. In 1887 Mr. George Gunton, an American economist quoted by Sir Graham Bower, wrote the following about housing con ditions in America: " The pest breeding and morally degrading conditions of t;he homes, and the social life of the great mass of labouring population in our industrial centres almost beggars descrip tion . . . my vocabulary is wholly inadequate to describe the condition of the tenement houses I have seen in the factory centres inN ew England." ) " In a single building in the town of W-- thirty-two feet long, twenty feet wide, three storeys high, with attics, 144 The Return to Laisser Faire there habitually exist thirty-nine people of all ages. For their use there is one pump and one privy, within twenty feet of each other, with several sink spouts discharging upon' the ground near by."

That was in 1887, just over forty years ago, and to-day, as we know, some twelve million American working men have houses with garages attached, in which they can keep the motors which they own. But there has been no movement by Government or by local authorities to build working-class houses in America. They have been building houses on busi ness principles, such as apply to every trade except housing here,and working the market from the top downwards, with the result that there is always a supply of better and better houses for every grade of society and that they are, always able to go on with the good work of pulling down the oldest and the worst. There is no movement to build motor cars for the working classes under government supervision, and"yet many a wage-earner owns a car and many more use cars. Cars are built to satisfy the demand of the market and when sold pass from hand to hand and reach down in this way to an ever growing number of users. Although no motors are being provided by Act of Parliament for the work ing classes, nobody can doubt that they will all have motors long before they have houses.

All the legislation and all the official activity is powerless to kill completely the ordinary workings of the market, and a great deal of building of little houses for middle-class persons is proceeding to day at prices ranging from £ 1,000 to £ 2,000, Housing 145 houses which would, before the war, have been built from £ 300 to £ 500. In due time and season, and the quicker 'the better, these houses will sink to their proper money values, their owners will, in the natural course, move up to something ·better, and the slum-dwellers will occupy them, until in course of time they themselves get out of date and are pulled down in response to some fresh movement of the population. If, instead of worrying about the working classes at all, the building trade would build whatever the market wants, there would always be more and more houses available, and the oldest and the least desirable would drop out of the market automatically.

In considering housing and building, it should always be remembered that the building trade is a protected trade. That is why building is something of a problem all over the world. There is an almost total absence of foreign competition in connection with building. Furthermore, the restraint of transport facilities gives a new share of protection to the building industry, and the builders of Essex are not in effective competition with the builders of Norfolk. This natural protection or shelter sets a premium on laziness and dilatory methods in the building trade the world over. It accounts for the almost total absence of machinery in the building trade, for the difficulties of mass production, and has the effect of keeping the whole of the human race not only short of houses but living all the time be hind what is the standard. of comfort known to· be possible. 10 146 The Return to Laisser Faire Progress in housing comfort, due to this natural protection, is slower than progress in the supply of any other human requirement. Seeing that this natural protection or shelter must, in the nature of things, exist, it is all the more necessary to eliminate from the building trade those forms of unnatural protection or shelter with which it is surrounded, and to promote inside the trade itself the most active ~ompetition.

:There is here the possibility of a great economic experiment, an experiment which would not be popular with the building trade, but which might produce results of immense value to the rest of us. If Parliament would declare that the housing market was a free market and would make it an offence to indulge in. any form of restraint in connection with the production of houses, whether by unions or com bines or trade associations; if it could be enacted that everyone was free without let or hindrance to take any part that seemed to him good in·the process of building, subject only to the minimum of official supervision; the whole of the problems of industry could be studied for all time from a new point of view and some very valuable informatidn secured. It would, in my view, be quickly demonstrated that freedom would multiply indefinitely the amount of employment, would raise indefinitely the level of wages, would reduce the cost of the product, and confer much-needed benefits all round.

So much for general considerations. The best illustration that I can give of the actual present posi tion of the housing problem is taken from the Rural Housing 147 District of Godstone . Sir William Jones and Mr. J. Topham Brown, melnbers of the Godstone Rural District Council, published in February, 1926, a re port of a close and detailed investigation which they undertook, and that report is full of vital informa- , tion. Godstone is a semi-rural, semi-suburban resi dential district twenty miles south of London. It is predominantly Conservative in opinion, and the in habitants are decent, middle-class, well-to-do, senti mental folk, who have been much impressed by all the political talk about housing since Mr. Lloyd George promised homes for heroes. Taking advantage of the various Acts of Parlia ment devised by the numerous Ministers of Health from Dr. Addison to Mr. Chamberlain, they have built 200 houses. The total capital expenditure of the Council, for land and houses alone, amounts to £ 272,493, or £ 84,594 more than the total assess able value of all the houses in the rural district.

Upon the completion of their present programme, one in thirteen of the total population of the whole district will be housed in these subsidised buildings. The monetary loss varies according to the price of the house from £ I per week downwards. Here is, therefore, a case where a local authority has taken its duties seriously, endeavoured to live up to the best that was asked of it, and in so doing has landed itself in serious difficulties. The present position is : (I) A housing debt larger than the total rateable value; (2) no provision of any kind has, or could have, been made for depreciation, renewals, repairs, or sinking fund; (3) as the market prices of 148 The Return to Laisser Faire building become normal, the Council will be faced with the necessity of writing its property down by a figure approaching £ 200,000, and, having reached that stage, will not have cleared a single slum. In deed, several houses which before the war were con demned as insanitary have been reopened to accom modate the natural growth of the population. The Council's credit is exhausted, and nothing further can be done. Meanwhile the cottage owner ·has been driven right off the market and the old-time popularity of an investment in bricks and mortar has been completely destroyed.

The absolute and total inability of a public authority to solve the housing problem is illustrated from the figures of the London County Council. No public body in the world has done more than the London County Council in this matter. All parties agree about this. Colonel Levita, the chairman, says: " The magnitude of the work may be gauged by the fact that up to March 31, 1924, capital expenditure on this account amounted to no less than£I5,50o,ooo~ The rent roll for the year 1924-25 is estimated at some £750,000, and accom modation for 121,000 persons has already been provided." The London Reform Union, years ago, in pamphlet No. 3253 stated: " More has been done under the various Housing Acts in London than in any other city-the total London expenditure under those Acts amounts, indeed, to nearly £3,000,000, or as much as that of all the rest of the United Kingdom put together. ' , When a Rolitician talks of millions he always gets the public ear. The average voter is by nature inHousing 149 capable of understanding what a million is. In deed, very few human brains can grasp the meaning of seven figures, and the politicians' millions there fore seem to satisfy all our requirements. In reality, however, all these official operations are merely the echo or residue of a far larger demand and, big as the remnants when put together appear to be, they are seldom if ever more than a small proportion of the natural and unregulated figure.

F or instance, in the twenty-one years from 1892 to 1912 the London County Council, which had done as much as all the rest of the United Kingdom put together, had provided housing accommodation for 54,141 persons. But there are 7,000,000 per sons in the County of London, and ~ad the housing of these 7,000,000 persons been left to the most active of the public authorities, a simple calculation would show that it would have taken 2,800 years to build the houses now used by those 7,000,000 persons. There can, of course, be no objection on any serious grounds to a public authority going into the market, as did the London County Council in the 'nineties, to build houses for profit on commercial lines. It may frequently happen that a public Council may be in a better position than a private individual to carry through a big housing scheme, and if that scheme is devised on economic lines, if it is made to pay, it can do no harm to any market, and can, of course, do great good in increasing the num ber of houses. VVhen, however, we reach the present position, where local authorities are build150 The Return to Laisser Faire ing certainly not more than a small percentage of the houses that are required, but are deliberately building at a loss and thus annihilating the rest· of the market, the operations of the Council are de structive and do no good at all.

That is seen very clearly from the following announcement which appeared in The Times of December 13th, 1920: " The Housing Committee of the London County Council has recommended the basis on which the rents shall be charged on the 582 houses that are being erected on the Roehampton estate. On an average it is estimated that the total annual outgoings per house will amount to £2 gs. gd. per week, exclusive of rates. Of this sum I5S. 6d. a week will be paid by the tenant as rent, the balance of £1 14S. 3d. a week being met out of the public funds. The annual out goings of each of the go teneme11ts in Becket House, now b~ing erected on the Tabard Garden estate, Southwark, are estimated at £1 I IS. Id. per week, and I2S. 2d. a week will be charged as rent, the remaining I8s. I Id. being met out of public 'funds." However much credit may be given to the County Council for the provision of a house, it must be admitted that they have rendered it impossible for the persons ·.who would normally have provided houses to carryon their operations. The figures show that things have worked that way. The highest figure ever reached by all these official activities is something over 200,000 houses a year. But we re quire at least that number of houses a year to provide us with one house per family per century.

After the war, the American bureaucrat got busy on the housing question, having been impressed by the example of our own Ministry of Health, Housing 15 1 and Senator W. M. Calder was made chairman of the 'Senate Committee that considered the housing problem. In July, 1921, less than three years later, Senator Calder was in London and gave an inter view to the newspapers, in which he said: " We discovered, after a most exhaustive survey, that the only way to remedy a housing shortage is to leave the matter entirely alone-no Government aid, or anything like that. It is true that this policy caused a raising of prices in certain parts at the time, but it had the effect of encouraging people to build" and to-day there is no housing shortage whatever in America. About 50 per cent of the population are house owners, and even the smallest new house has its garage." A few remarks on the arithmetic of the building trade may not seem altogether out of place here, as it would be useful if half-a-dozen elementary figures could be forced into the public mind. There is a supply of building labour which for many years has been for practical purposes fixed. The Ministry of Labour figures show that the number of brick layers in the three years to July, 1923-24-25, were: 56,260; 56,530; 64,260; as compared with more than 100,000 twenty years ago. The figures for plasterers for the same periods were: 15,760 ; 15,860; 17,49°; and of masons : 21,880; 22,°30; 23,490. The Ministry of Labour Gazette states that ," with the exception of carpenters and pIumbers, the number of skilled workpeople in the building trades has varied only slightly between 1922 and 1925." These numbers are in every case much below the figures of twenty years ago, an interesting and startling phenomenon, for all the public and political pressure to secure houses has actually 152 The Return to Laisser Faire driven thousands of men out of the building trade.

It is further known that our maximum output is in the region of 200,000 houses. Remembering that there are 9,250,000 families to be housed, making allowance for a moderate growth in population, and giving each house a life of fifty years, it will be seen that our total capacity for house building as we stand to-day is one house per family per century. This simple and startling-fact explains the reason why the price of houses has fluctuated so violently in recent years. The supply is practically fixed, and the pouring of public money into a market with a fixed supply can have no other effect than to raise prices. The astounding thing about this position is that the working classes themselves, for whom the houses are wanted, have been befooled into thinking that, in some mysterious way, their interests are threatened if any protest is raised against the monopoly of building labour. With these simple figures in front of us, it becomes evident that most of the political talk about housing schemes is utter rubbish. It may be possible by special pressure in special quarters to divert a little building effort from one class of building to another , generally. a thoroughly uneconomical thing to do, but it can never be possible so to provide the houses of which politicians talk so glibly. It is not too much to say that the housing programmes of all political parties constitute a heartless fraud upon the working classes, nor can we escape the conclusion that so long as the labour monopoly is permitted to exist, the slum-dwellers must remain in the slums.