“But the exigencies of trade have led the Metropolitan Board of Works and the District Surveyors to permit the area on the ground storey to be covered over.”[119]
In fact, the insufficiency of the laws as regarded buildings intended for human habitation, and the mal-administration or non-administration of those laws which existed, resulted in the creation of evils which inevitably and most injuriously affected the health of the public, not merely at the time, but for many years to come.
The Medical Officer of Health for St. Giles’, in 1871, pointed out the necessity of a change of the law.
“It is very much to be desired that the law gave more stringent powers to local authorities to prevent the re-erection of buildings upon the old sites, so that the new buildings might not become as unfavourable to health as the old ones…. Such a perpetuation of mischief ought not to be permitted, and the rights of landlords should be subordinated to the public good.”
The condition of existing, as apart from new, houses also stood in need of many changes of the law to effect their redemption. The necessity was forcibly portrayed by the Medical Officer of Health for St. Marylebone in 1870. He wrote:—
“Of all the obstacles that stand in the way of anything like effective sanitary operations, not only in St. Marylebone, but in nearly every other district of the metropolis, there are none so formidable, so apparently irremediable as the miserable house accommodation provided for the labouring classes. Year after year I am called upon to tell the same unvarying story of rotten floors, broken walls and ceilings, windows and roofs that let in the wind and the rain, chimneys that will not let out the smoke, and of these wretched tenements being crowded with honest, hard-working people, from the cellars to the attics.”
Parliament continued in this decade the greater solicitude about and interest in matters connected with the public health, which it had recently been showing; and the first year of the decade, 1871, is noteworthy for the adoption by Parliament of a measure which had far-reaching effects upon the sanitary evolution of the metropolis. This was the creation (by “The Local Government Board Act, 1871”) of a Central Government Authority for the supervision by Government of the sanitary authorities in England and Wales, and also of those in London.
Matters relating to the health of the people had become so large a portion of the work of government, that the necessity had forced itself upon Parliament of concentrating in one department of the Government the supervision of the laws relating to the public health, the relief of the poor, and local government.
The new authority, which was entitled the Local Government Board, was not a representative body, but was a Government Department. It was to consist of a President, appointed by the Queen, and of the following “ex-officio” members—the Lord President of the Privy Council, all the Secretaries of State for the time being, the Lord Privy Seal, and the Chancellor of the Exchequer.