THE HOUSING QUESTION 79
Slum-Dwellers (2 years later) : " Can you start
now ? "
Minister of Health : " We’ve stopped building
houses, so you must stay where you are.”
In view of this refusal of the Government to provide
the necessary money to work the Act, it is poignant to
read of the way people are to-day existing in Great
Britain.
The following is an extract from the report of the
Royal Commission on Housing in Scotland in
1917
" These are the broad results of our survey : unsatisfactory
sites of houses and villages, insufficient supplies of water, unsatisfactory
provision for drainage, grossly inadequate provision
for the removal of refuse, widespread absence of decent sanitary
conveniences, the persistence of the unspeakably filthy privymidden
in many of the mining areas, badly constructed, incurably
damp labourers' cottages on farms, whole townships unfit for
human occupation in the crofting counties and islands, primitive
and casual provision for many of the seasonal workers, gross
overcrowding and huddling of the sexes together in the congested
industrial villages and towns, occupation of one-room houses by
large families, groups of lightless and unventilated houses in the
older burghs, clotted masses of slums in the great cities. To
these add the special problems symbolised by the farmed-out
houses, the model lodging-houses, congested back-lands, and
ancient closes. To these, again, add the cottages a hundred
years old in some of the rural villages, ramshackle brick survivals
of the mining outbursts of seventy years ago in the mining fields,
monotonous miners’ rows flung down without a vestige of townplan
or any effort to secure modem conditions of sanitation,
ill-planned houses that must become slums in a few years, old
houses converted without necessary sanitary appliances and
