Liverpool demolition schemes. In the case of a public-house in Eldon Street the award was £5,900, although the net assessment was only £67. A Limekiln Lane house was awarded £4,500, the net assessment being £72. The award for a Northumberland Street house was also £4,500, the assessment being £76. The cost of removing these three houses was thus about £15,000, which raised the cost of the Bevington Street re-housing scheme by over 10s. per yard, and of the Frank Street scheme by over £1 per yard.1 The total net assessment of the three houses for rating is only £215, or about a third of what the award would justify (say £600); while it would seem safe to assume that the total claims must have been about £20,000. As the claims were based on the business done and about to be lost through the demolition, the weekly takings of the three houses cannot have been less than £120 a week, an estimate which makes the low assessment appear more striking. Is not even the Northumberland Street house an apt illustration of the injustice to the municipality from a rating point of view? The net annual value of this house might fairly be estimated at £180, and this after deducting all outgoings in respect of rates, taxes and compensation levy. It is this net figure of £180 which should be compared with the actual net assessment of £76. Even if the Government assessment be taken, it is. only £100, or £80 below the amount on which the municipality is reasonably entitled to levy rates. The annual licence duty of £30 is a Government tax and not a municipal rate, but it has, of course, been taken into consideration when estimating the annual value of the premises. The Housing of the Working Classes Act, under which these premises were acquired for the demolition and re-housing scheme, provided that the amount to be paid for the property is its "fair market value." The amount awarded by the arbitrator is not questioned, but one cannot but notice the appalling inadequacy of the rates received for years past from these properties. Comparing the awards and the assessments, it may be assumed that the arbitrator may have had placed before him figures which the Assessment Committee failed to obtain, and what is much more to the point, and in fact is the question at issue, must have failed to obtain in the case of many more public-houses. The average compensation for public-houses throughout the country has risen 1 Vide Proceedings of the Liverpool Housing Committee, 12th Feb., 1910. from £717 in 1905 to £1,116 in 1908, and for 1909 £1,200 per house. Yet these three houses were barely assessed at £72 each, while they are valued by the arbitrator at an average of £5,000 each. The disparity is obvious. According to the Table of Local Debt shown in Comparative Municipal Statistics, issued by the London County Council in 1915, the debt outstanding for housing of the working classes in the sixteen principal towns of the United Kingdom at the end of the year 1912-13 (the last year for which complete figures were available) was £10,555,942. Presuming that the relative cost of land has been 53 per cent. of the total cost as in Liverpool, and that this proportion holds good in respect of the debts, then of the sum of £10,555,942, no less than £5,946,649 may be said to be the cost of land (after deducting receipts from sales of surplus lands). Taking 60 per cent. of this sum as representing compensation for public-houses (being the proportion in the Adlington Street area) we-find that in the sixteen principal towns in the United Kingdom approximately £3,356,789 has been provided for this purpose. According to the census figures given on page 2 of the above work the population of these sixteen towns at the census of 1911 was 13,500,811. The compensation paid, therefore, was equal to about 5s. per head of the population. The total number of dwellings provided by these sixteen authorities is 21,545.2 The cost of the compensation for the public-houses has averaged, therefore, on this basis approximately £156 per dwelling. These figures, whilst they may not be a true basis to work upon (it being impossible to maintain with certainty that there is a definite relation between the cost of the schemes and the outstanding loans), are at least sufficient to explain the inactivity of so many local authorities in regard to the housing of the working classes. The London County Council, which succeeded the Metropolitan Board of Works in 1889, introduced, in its first year of existence, an entirely new policy, later known as "the The Betterment betterment principle." betterment principle." This principle was that any enhanced value of premises, such as might accrue from better frontages, better means of approach, and Principle. better surroundings, should rightly go not to the owner, who had done nothing to bring about the new conditions, but to the public body, which had done all. The principle had existed for some time in America where the enhancement of value was paid down by the owner in a lump sum, but the London County Council proposed to make it a tax on the premises. The Duke of Argyll strongly criticized the scheme, claiming that the tax was illogical and unjust because the "goodment " goodment" of a house in a small street was no more due to the owner or occupier than the "betterment" of a house in a big new street. Other critics argued that if "betterment " applied to some houses, "worsement" might be claimed against a municipal authority by the owners of premises unfavourably affected by the diversion of traffics to new streets, or by tradesmen compelled to move elsewhere. The opponents of the scheme as a whole considered the question from the point of view of the property market; the Council's experts, led by Sir Thomas Farrer, adopted the higher and less disputable line of argument that a local authority had a right to taxation, and, as street improvements cost money, taxation should fall to a special extent on those benefited by the expenditure. An attempt was made to introduce the principle in the Strand Improvement Bill, promoted by the Council in 1890 for pulling down Holywell Street and opening up the "bottleneck" of the Strand at that point, but failed; the clause was thrown out by the House of Commons Committee, chiefly on the ground that the Council made no estimate of the amount of "betterment," and that the definition of the principle and the limitations of its application were arbitrary. In a Bill for constructing a proper approach to the south side of the Tower Bridge, the London County Council, in 1893, again tried to establish the "betterment " principle. The support of local authorities had been secured and the advocates of the principle were found on both sides of the House of Commons. The clause passed the Commons but was cut out of the Bill by the Lords. The Commons, however, insisted by a majority of 221 to 88 on the retention of the clause, many Unionists voting for it, but it was again struck out in the House of Lords. The principle of "betterment was, however, passed by the House of Lords in 1894. By this date it had made considerable progress with the general public, while the Committee of the House which approved the principle included such former opponents as Lord Halsbury, Lord Salisbury, and Lord Onslow. This made possible an adequate approach from the south side of the Tower Bridge, with the result that the bridge was finished and formally opened in June of that year. The principle has since been included in the majority of the Acts of Parliament, both general and local, which relate to property. SECTION VI SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION "It is only by providing homes for the working people, that is by providing for them not only shelter, but shelter of such a kind as to protect life and health and to make family life possible, free from surroundings which tend to immorality, that the evils of crowded city life can be mitigated and overcome."-Report of Tenement House Commission: New York. Introduction. CHAPTER XXV HOUSING AFTER THE WAR IT has been sufficiently emphasized in the previous sections of this work that the economic cause of the present housing problem is not the uneducated demand but the failure of the supply. This was undoubtedly so before the war. It is proved by the movement on the part of the working classes in supporting the Garden Cities and Garden Suburbs, and in the vast sums which industrial and provident societies have loaned to their members both for house purchase and for house building. In this connection the co-operative societies alone have provided more than eight millions of money during the past few years. This difficulty of supply may also be considered as one of the subsidiary reasons for the establishment by employers of such places as Port Sunlight, Earswick, and the other Garden Cities which have been erected round factories in rural areas. The ulterior effect of this has been that, as the supply cannot be increased, the rise of price has become permanent and will remain so until the new schemes under the new Housing Act restore the equilibrium. The normal annual increase in houses not exceeding £20 annual value is 75,000, a figure which hardly keeps up with the normal annual increase of population. But, since the war began, the building of such houses has practically ceased. By the end of 1918 the cause alone amounted to Housing after the War. shortage of houses due to this |