“The houses are so old that the air is really poisonous; it is full of miasma and dirt … all the whitewashing and ventilation in the world would do no good. The condition of the property has got worse year by year.”
These are but some of the cases about which “representations” were made to the Metropolitan Board of Works—sufficient, however, as illustration of others. And what an awful and appalling picture they present. Had the condition described been only temporary, a mere passing phase, it would have been dreadful enough; but it had been going on for years—it was permanently so—producing year after year its fearful crop of misery and crime, of disease and death, and scattering broadcast the seeds of disease and death, the “owners” all the while exacting the uttermost farthing they could in rents from the miserable inhabitants, and placidly and remorselessly giving disease and death in return: going on, too, during twenty years of government by “local authority”—Vestry and District Board—and nearly ten years after the passing of the Sanitary Act of 1866, with its provisions for the abatement of overcrowding and the maintenance of a certain standard of cleanliness.
A few years’ experience of the working of the Housing Act of 1875 proved that it was dilatory, cumbrous, and costly to the ratepayers of London.
The arbitrator frequently awarded to owners of places unfit for habitation compensation equal or almost equal in amount to what would have been given if the houses had been good and sound. This the Metropolitan Board felt to be an injustice to the ratepayers upon whom the charge fell, and an encouragement to owners of houses occupied by poor people to allow them to fall into or remain in a dilapidated condition.
In the year 1879 the Board accordingly made representations to the Government, and suggested that the owners of unhealthy houses should not be compensated in proportion to the profit they derived from such houses, but according to their value as places pronounced unfit for habitation. The Board also pointed out—“the great loss entailed upon the ratepayers by the obligation which the Board was under to provide for the accommodation in suitable dwellings in the same area of at least as many persons as were displaced. This obligation rendered it necessary for the Board to sell, at a very low price, ground, which, with the dilapidated buildings upon it, had cost the Board seven or eight times as much, and which, if the Board had been free to dispose of it for commercial purposes, and to provide for the dispossessed people elsewhere, would have realised a much higher price.”[139]
On the six areas which had been sold to the Peabody Trustees it was estimated that the Board—or in other words, the ratepayers of London—would lose the large sum of £562,000.
The Board suggested that it should have power to dispose of the cleared ground for commercial purposes, and to provide for the re-housing of the displaced families in other parts of London.
This latter suggestion was not adopted, but Parliament passed an Act in 1879 which to some extent lessened, though it by no means removed the defects of which the Board complained, for the Board declared that “after careful consideration, it thought it well not to prepare any more improvement schemes until some further experience has been gained of the working of the Amendment Act of 1879.”
And in 1879, also, an Act[140] was passed which nominally “amended,” but in reality destroyed the real good of Torrens’ Act of 1868, and gave the owner power to require the local authority to purchase the premises which had been condemned as unfit for human habitation, and which the local authorities were to rebuild and hold—thus practically relieving the worst class of slum house “owners” of any consequences for their malpractices, relieving them, too, in the most open way at the expense of the ratepaying public, as it empowered the Vestry “to levy a rate of twopence in the pound to bear this expense as well as that of building sanitary dwellings on the site.”