The following table shows the comparative numbers of houses and persons in the towns visited for the purpose of this report : APPENDIX. No. 2. Means house. house. inhabited inhabited of repressing overcrowding. The figures in the first column serve to show the demand there was for houses. The state of the towns has however changed in this respect since the Census. In Bradford, for instance, the number of uninhabited houses has gone down to next to nothing. The number of persons per house in the three towns which head the list has been increasing for many years. This table is extracted from the Census report, and applies to three of the sub-districts visited. It will be observed, for instance, that of the 1,343 inhabited houses of St. Giles, S. only 466 are inhabited by single families, while 138 contain in each seven families and upwards. APPENDIX. No. 2. On the HOUSES UNFIT FOR HABITATION. The powers the public possess to prevent the inhabitation of unfit houses include section 75. of the Towns Improvement Clauses Act, Housing of the by which buildings dangerous to passengers or to neighbouring occuPoor in Towns, piers may be demolished. This section does not appear to be intended to protect the inmates themselves, and may be dismissed as not applicable to the present question. Under the Public Health Act of 1848, section of repressing 9, medical certificate will compel internal cleaning, but not repairs, and overcrowding. the costly and cumbrous machinery requisite for so small a result makes by Dr. Hunter. Means Cellars. this clause one seldom pressed to a prosecution even in towns which have adopted the act. The inspector of nuisances uses the clause as a threat, and when the local board will, as at Birmingham, provide lime and brushes, he can usually enforce cleansing, if he has time for a house-to-house inspection. Not unfrequently the materials are provided, as at Bristol, by private charity, and in few considerable places does there seem to be difficulty about so trifling a matter; the difficulty is usually where sufficient provision is not made for regular inspection, and whole streets of houses are laid under dirt through carelessness. In this section it would appear that the medical witnesses, having no right of entry, and having no one to employ them, ought to be tending disease present on or near the premises, otherwise their opinion is but speculative and may be only so accepted by the justices. Section 66. is part of the law of Common Lodgings. Section 67. deals with cellar dwellings. Certain towns which have not yet adopted the act are still distinguished by the occupation of cruelly unsuitable cellar bedrooms. Some regulation of cellars was in use under local acts, as at Newcastle-on-Tyne, under section 83. of the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Improvement Act, 1865, where powers uncertain, but formidable when fully administered, are conferred, or at Leeds, where some trifling demand of a window or fireplace was what the act of 1842 contained, and where very few indeed of the cellar bedrooms (the number of which the inspector told me was constantly increasing) conformed with the provisions of the Public Health Act. Liverpool had made a provision against cellar bedrooms a few years before the Public Health Act, of a more certain character, but by far too limited. The cellars which were permitted to remain occupied were to be 7 feet high, 2 feet 4 above the surface, and with an area in front 2 feet wide. These were 66 passed," and placed upon a register, and are even now exempt from the present law, which exacts the terms of the Public Health Act, mentioned above. When it is considered that cellars or bedrooms, dug out of a soil differing very little from the contents of an ash-midden, are represented (at least in Leeds and Bradford) to be increasing in number, and that on a chance visit by day the floors were seen half covered with beds, and such reports were elicited as are recorded in Part IV., it would seem as if the section 67 quoted should not be left to voluntary adoption, but be made part of a General Nuisance Act. And now, after 20 years' privilege, the time seems to have arrived when all "passed cellars" and other exemptions may be abolished, and the standard of the Public Health Act demanded to the uttermost. Section 8. of the Nuisances Removal Act indeed declares that the word "nuisance" under this Act shall include "any premises in such a state as to be a nuisance or injurious to health." The administration of this and other sanitary clauses by the local authorities varies in efficiency in various places with the strength of the byelaws, the skill, industry, and independence of the officers, and lastly with the presence or want of a medical officer in places where such an appointment is desirable. A want of uniformity of byelaws and practice in matters common to the whole kingdom is itself troublesome and obstructive, and must mean in each place weakness of the local authorities in some detail considered important elsewhere. It will be found, on reference to the local reports, that the cellar is not a cheap residence, in which it would be cruel to disturb the miserable poor. In Leeds, at 6 Off Street, an unfurnished cellar seven feet two high, the ceiling four inches above the ground, held three adults and three children as their only apartment, and they paid for it 1s. 6d. a week. Again, in the same street, and in York Street adjoining, cellars six feet high, and totally underground, were let furnished with 21. worth of furniture for 4s. a week each, and were each the only apartment of a family. In another, in the same Off Strect, lived six adult regular residents, five of whom were labouring men, whose gross income was not likely to be less than 47. to 57. Similar prices were paid at Bradford. In the same county is Sheffield, a town without any cellar bedroom at all, where the increase of persons is at least as rapid, where wages are quite as high, and where the corporate powers are much less influential than at Leeds or Bradford. Here, and in many other places, are numerous small singlebedroomed houses let at 1s. 6d. and 1s. 8d. a week, full of people, certainly, but superior beyond compare to the single-cellar-bedroom tenements of the neighbouring towns. No law prevented the use of cellar bedrooms in Sheffield. The comparison merely shows that a large town can do very well without them. Under the Scotch Act of 1862, sections 352 and 353, provisions about cellar residence will be found. 66 Other houses may of course be absolutely uninhabitable, besides Other cellars; but the law has not specified any other conditions under which unfitnesses. this may be declared to be the case; so all further administration in the matter depends on the combined or diverse opinion of the skilled witnesses and the justices, acting under the 13th section of the Nuisances Removal Act. Not even can that most hateful structure, a bedroom whose floor forms the roof of an ash midden and dungstead, be condemned on the general ground that bedrooms so placed are ipso facto unfit for habitation, but evidence must in each case be given that the arrangement constitutes a nuisance," and even that evidence has to satisfy the justices on its merits as skilled evidence. In some great towns, however, even where the members of the bench are constantly shifting, repeated decisions have given the inspectors confidence of a conviction in every instance in which the facts of this one great nuisance are proved; but with regard to unfit dwellings, no practice has yet become established as a rule with borough benches on any point but this. The ordinary closing of a house under the section 13. of the Nuisances Removal Act is used with great caution by most justices, and though sufficient to enforce reforms of privies and drains, and limewashing, it cannot be done to prevent overcrowding or the letting of insufficient or unfit single-room houses. There must be "nuisance" to justify action under the section, and a list of nuisances is prefixed. Other conditions of absolute unfitness remain, but neither law nor rules of benches condemn them. It is submitted that in the same category with cellar bedrooms might be placed (2) all bedrooms over receptacles of human dung, (3) certain bedrooms not originally intended as human habitations, and (4) bedrooms which have no window. these might be added rooms in the condition proscribed by the Glasgow Act, having insufficient area in front of the windows, or being too To APPENDIX. No. 2. On the small for inhabitation even by a single person. Beyond these classes every instance might be subject to skilled opinion. Byelaws under the Local Government Act have been decided to affect Housing of the the unfitness of those residences only which have been built since the Poor in Towns, constitution of the district. The Glasgow Act is less preservative of vested by Dr. Hunter. interests. In order to obtain exemption for a bedroom from its powers, proof must be given, not only of having been built before the act, but of Means The operation of the Liverpool Act having been used as a bedroom. of repressing overcrowding. and the practice at Nottingham must be considered in the local reports. The operation of the local boards of health upon the dwellings of poor people was not retrospective, except in a few named cases, and the good results of their formation, which are now visible, are mostly in proportion to the number of houses rebuilt or newly erected since the application of the act. Extension of towns in England seems to be a certain future, and few exceptions to this rule have yet shown themselves. The earlier the adoption of the act has been the more effects are now visible, and not only in the environs of new growth but in the old centres, for even here the slow sure process of dilapidation leads to a regeneration. It may therefore be believed that in towns under the Local Government Act the number of unfit dwellings is diminishing both in relation to the whole and also positively, and the increase of such towns may be taken to mean their improvement. Having regard to overcrowding as well as to unfitness, there are a few exceptions to this rule which it would seem may be reduced to three cases :(1.) Where a very large town is placed upon the sea or river, and a poor population finds that improvement means to them removal miles away from their work, which cannot follow them away from the waterside. Liverpool, for instance, has multiplied 16 times in the past century, and the new comers have pressed to the same waterside which found employment for the few original thousands. (2.) Where, especially in a seaboard town, increase is blocked in certain directions through the reservation of property, of which the most remarkable, though not the only instances, are where building is confined by fortified lines. (3.) Where, as at Bradford, the local authority has been thought to be too exacting, and has been met by an obstinate refusal on the part of the capitalists to build houses for working men on the conditions prescribed. Where there are these exceptional local conditions present, the advantage of wide streets and yards, and of low houses, is purchased by the difficulties of long distances and the habits of receiving crowds of smuggled lodgers which follow. With these difficulties local boards have to contend in their efforts, which in large places at least seem always to have been directed honourably to public good. What railways may do for the relief of such cases is yet but an experiment only tried in London, where so far it seems to some experienced persons a hopeful one. On the passing of the Local Government Act the Government issued a model scheme of proposed byelaws, under the sanction of the act. Among them was this important power in No. 27. In any case where it is certified to the local board by the surveyor, inspector of nuisances, or by any two medical practitioners, that any building is unfit for human habitation, the local board may, by their order, affix conspicously on the building a notice, declaring that the same is not fit for human habitation, and shall not, after a date therein to be specified, be inhabited; and any person who, after the date mentioned, continues to let or occupy, or knowingly suffers to be occupied, such building shall be liable to a penalty not exceeding twenty shillings for every day during which the same is so let. Provided always, that if at any time after such order made, the local board shall be satisfied that such house has become fit for human habitation, they mav revoke their said order. This has been adopted by many boards, and so lately as 1865 new byelaws for Sheffield and Sunderland, containing the clause, have received sanction; but it should be known that although section 34. appears to warrant the bye-law, there is a proviso that no such byelaw shall affect any building erected before the constitution of the district; and the decision of Chief Justice Erle, in the case of Burgess v. Peacock took the whole strength out of the byelaw; for it is very improbable that houses erected under the rule of the board can be by the same authority declared uninhabitable when finished. The byelaw can only meet cases where a house has been erected in defiance of local authority. Still process against an old house under this byelaw is not unfrequently successful where the above quoted decision is unrecognised or unknown. The Diseases Prevention Act is only to be put in force by Order in Council, under the circumstances of serious danger of epidemic disease. It is administered by the guardians of the poor, probably because they have a staff of medical officers. The act empowers the authorities to make a house-to-house visitation, and although it does not prescribe the purpose of such visitation, the power facilitates the execution of the law against overcrowding and internal filth. This power was being exercised at Leeds, where, the corporation being otherwise engaged, the administration of the removal of nuisances had fallen to the guardians, who administered under the fiction of the Diseases Prevention Act being in force. They sent inspectors all round the township daily and nightly, who prosecuted to conviction instances of overcrowding and internal filth. The guardians found plenty of useful work in dealing with the underground cellars and crowded houses to the extent of their supposed powers, and one could have no feeling but of regret that these powers had so little of substance. Except the Scotch Act of 1862, the local acts, which are stronger to deal with this matter of unfit dwellings than are the general statutes, are confined to Liverpool and Glasgow. Sometimes the power which a local authority has to make new streets may be used advantageously for the destruction of "rookeries;" but this is nowhere the overt object of such improvements, except at Liverpool, where a process of destruction of evil-doing buildings, and occasional erection of privies in place of those destroyed, is going on, guided by sanitary reasons only, and administered in the main by the medical officer. A gentleman of upright principle and sober judgment, thus practically left to himself, selecting here a bit and there a bit, uncorking mouths of courts, opening ends to alleys, gutting ancient yards of a crowd of new buildings which modern pressure has caused to be put up in the small space which had been originally left for air, destroying the numerous ash-middens or cesspools with which a small proprietary always encumber a town, and substituting a few small trough waterclosets, will secure to a town, by slow annual process well matured, infinitely greater results for any given sum than if the buildings to be purchased were previously described by an act of Parliament, suggesting magnificent schemes and enormous prices. For the success of such a measure a town must have confidence, and must employ an officer of integrity above suspicion, and one, moreover, who will indulge no dreams of architectural symmetry, but look to the one object of disembarrassing the most miserable parts of the town of such buildings as are not only of themselves unfit for human habitation, but the removal of which will give air to the greatest number of those who are gasping around. How this has been begun in Liverpool is described in Part II.; but as it is to a certain extent a measure of destruction and diminution of men's houses, the APPENDIX. No. 2. On the Housing of the Poor in Towns, by Dr. Hunter. Means of repressing overcrowding. |