And they also recommended that—
“All existing sanitary legislation should be more fully enforced, especially in those parts of the suburbs where buildings are so rapidly springing up.”
A Bill was at once introduced into Parliament, the object of which was to lay down such rules for estimating the value of the premises to be purchased as would prevent the owners of insanitary property obtaining an undue price for it—“the intention of Parliament being that the owner should not gain by having allowed his property to fall into an insanitary state.”
It was passed, and as an Act it further empowered the Secretary of State, under certain circumstances, to dispense with the obligation of re-housing the people to a greater extent than one-half of those displaced.
Into the detailed intricacies of many of these Housing Acts it is really useless to enter; and the enumeration of the details tends to obscure the broad and essential features of the whole subject.
In the effort of the “owners” to repudiate the responsibility for their or their predecessors’ infamous neglect, and to shift the blame for the appalling state of affairs on the middlemen and the occupiers; in the effort of the middlemen to evade their responsibilities by availing themselves of every obstructive device the law so lavishly placed at their disposal, and of both of them to extort the utmost amount of money they could for their disease-begetting, death-distributing property; the unfortunate occupiers were the immediate sufferers and victims, and a huge wrong and injury was inflicted upon the community.
It was mere tinkering with the subject to pass an Act removing some petty technical difficulties for putting some previous and very limited Act in force, and to diminish the expense and delay in carrying out the Act.
It was farcical to amend the Standing Orders of Parliament, fixing twenty instead of fifteen as the minimum number of houses in any one parish which could be acquired by the Metropolitan Board without preparing a re-housing scheme, as if that would revolutionise the condition of the housing of the people of London, and yet something not far short of revolution was required if the housing of the people was to be reformed, and put on a proper sanitary basis.
It is manifest that what was being dealt with by these Acts was only a fragment of the great housing question, and that such destruction of insanitary buildings as could possibly be effected by these means would amount to but a fraction of those unfit for human habitation in London, and would not touch the thousands of inhabited houses in every parish of London which were insanitary in varying degree, and dangerous to the individual and public health. It is clear, too, that if the insanitary conditions of the housing of the people were to be dealt with on a large scale, and with success, measures must be taken to secure the sanitary condition of the houses which such legislation did not touch. Otherwise general improvement was impossible, and existing conditions must continue indefinitely to flourish, and to produce their inevitable and enormous crop of deadly evil.
How urgent was the need for reform in some parts of London may be gauged from the description of the condition of things in Bethnal Green in 1883, given by the Medical Officer of Health of the Parish:—