“… As a rule it is the professional insanitary property owner who has to be summoned time after time, and who exhausts every technicality and raises every possible objection, well knowing that in the usual way only an order costing some few shillings will be made against him.”
Others, however, went further. The Medical Officer of Health for Islington wrote in 1893:—
“Since 1891 there has been a steady forward movement, and … one now constantly hears of the persecution of the ‘poor property owner.’
“That owner who for long years had everything his own way, and who did as little as he could to make things healthy for his tenants, knowing well that there were plenty of persons ready to occupy any or every house. Property has rights, but so has flesh and blood; and if it be right that property should be protected from unnecessary exactions, it is surely righteous that the health and lives of human beings should be safeguarded in every way.”
And in the following year, writing about some insanitary bakehouses, he said: “It has always seemed to me a very absurd argument that because a place has been allowed to be occupied for a long series of years to the detriment of the health of the people working therein that therefore it must not be now abolished.
“If those insanitary places have been occupied for such a long time, surely they have more than recouped their owners for the money that has been originally spent on their erection?”
The Medical Officer of Health for St. James’, after twenty-five years’ work as Medical Officer of Health, declared in 1898:—
“The only practical course is to saddle the landlord with full responsibility for the neglect or misconduct of the tenants whom he harbours, at large rents, for his own profit.”
In 1894 Parliament passed “The Local Government (England and Wales) Act,” which included London in its scope, and which introduced great changes as to the electorate, the mode of election, and the qualification of vestrymen.