“At present the poor rates are raised by the parish having to pay the expenses of afflicted poor persons, whose misery has in most instances arisen from defective sanitary arrangements, the remedying of which ought to have been effected at the expense of the landlords, who derive their substance from the miseries of the poor.”
And the Medical Officer of Health for St. George’s, Hanover Square:—
“I am compelled to say that the number of dingy and dilapidated houses is a proof either that the owners of house property do not exercise sufficient control over their tenants, or that they themselves are grievously neglectful of their duties to their tenants and to society at large. The health of the Parish should not be allowed to suffer through the default of either landlord or tenant…. Here there need be no scruple about interference with private property.
“No man is allowed to sell poisonous food, and none should be allowed to sell poisonous lodgings, more especially as the effects of poisonous food are confined to the persons who eat it—the effects of unwholesome apartments may be diseases that may be spread.”
On the equity of compelling the owners to put their houses in order, there are many insisters.
“It is but right,” wrote the Medical Officer of Health for Fulham (1857), “that those who have hitherto fed their own resources by impoverishing others, should now in their turn make good the damage.”
The Medical Officer of Health for Poplar (1856), wrote:—
“While on the one hand we must not proceed in a reckless manner so to burden property as to render it entirely unproductive, yet on the other we cannot allow the labouring man, whose health is the only property he can call his own, to live in unwholesome places to the destruction of that capital, by which alone he is enabled to support himself and family.”
And the Medical Officer of Health for Mile-End-Old-Town (1856):—