Arthur Cecil Pigou

“ The fundamental question as to the wisdom or otherwise of properly arranged subsidies upon the housing accommodation offered to the poor still remains to be faced. Ought housing accommodation to be treated as education and insurance are now treated, or ought it to be left, like food and clothing, without the support of any subsidy? ”

“ It ignores the fact that the root evil of the old Poor Law lay in the circumstance that the subsidies which it granted depended directly upon, and varied inversely with, the wages paid to the recipient, thus creating a direct temptation, on the side of the masters, towards cutting wage-rates, and on the side of the men towards idleness. Subsidies, the amount of which, as paid to separate individuals, varies not inversely with their earnings, but directly with the quantity of their purchases of some commodity, are wholly different from the subsidies of the old Poor Law. ”

“ I ask your attention first to a policy that is relevant to many forms of minimum standard, and the beneficial influence of which is open to no dispute. The failure of poor persons to attain the level we deem to be satisfactory in the matter of nourishment, of education and of insurance, is frequently the result, not so much of poverty as of ignorance and mismanagement. ”

“ It is plain that, if the public authorities choose to give what is, in effect, a bounty on the production of any commodity largely consumed by poor persons, and so to enable that commodity to be bought by them below cost price, a number of people, who would otherwise have failed to reach one or more of the minimum standards that have been set up, may now succeed in reaching them. ”

“ Advice and help to poor persons in the art of keeping their houses in a good state—like instruction in the art of cooking—and the condemnation of uninhabitable houses—like the condemnation of diseased meat—may accomplish no small amount of good. By themselves, however, it is obvious that they cannot establish everywhere the desired housing minimum. ”

“ In addition, however, to these two obvious elements in satisfactory housing accommodation, we are rapidly coming to recognise a third. If one walks through an ordinary town to-day, and particularly if one walks through London, it is obvious at once that the arrangement and external form of the houses leaves much to be desired. One sees, for instance, a great number of buildings frequently huddled together, stretching in long rows of dismal sameness, with narrow streets and no green spaces. ”

“ The most conspicuous and most obvious imperfections are usually to be found in those congested districts inhabited by the poor, that exist in the central parts of some large towns. But even in the suburbs where towns are expanding—in some of the out-lying parts of Cambridge, for example—adjacent to open country, there are growing up with a terrible rapidity hideous unbroken tracts of undistinguishable, featureless, gardenless habitations. ”

“ Popular writers often imply that the experience of the old Poor Law has condemned once and for all every form of public assistance to poor persons, except such as is given under disciplinary and deterrent conditions. The provision from national funds, whether in whole or in part, of education, of insurance premiums, or of housing accommodation, is denounced on the ground that it constitutes relief in aid of wages and is, therefore, a reversion to the discredited policy of Speenhamland. ”

“ If it is decided to confer a bounty on the provision of housing accommodation for the poor—to provide houses for them, as it is sometimes said, at less than an economic rent—that bounty should not be so arranged as to differentiate in favour of an anti-social distribution of population. There is reason to believe that, in most large towns, the play of economic forces tends to concentrate population more closely than is socially desirable in the central districts. ”

“ It is the duty of a civilized State to lay down certain minimum conditions in every department of life, below which it refuses to allow any of its free citizens to fall. There must be a minimum standard of conditions in factories, a minimum standard (varying of course with the strain involved in different industries) of leisure, a minimum standard of dwelling accommodation, a minimum standard of education, of medical treatment in case of illness, and of wholesome food and clothing. ”

“ The policy of attacking the housing problem with the weapon of State aid does not involve a reversion to rates in aid of wages of the old evil kind, and cannot be dismissed on the authority of experience. ”

“ In very many cases, however, inability to afford the price of decent housing is not susceptible of this simple remedy. It arises, at least in part, from the fact that the ill-housed workman's income, however well it may be expended, is insufficient to give command over the various sorts of minima which we deem it proper he should attain. This is the dominant difficulty with which housing reformers are faced. It is not—let me emphasise the point—specially or peculiarly a housing difficulty. ”

“ I believe it to be right that the well-to-do should be summoned by the State to help their poorer neighbours whenever that summons can be enforced without evoking gravely injurious reactions upon the production of weath and, therewith, ultimately upon the fortunes of the poor themselves. ”

“ Education, on the other hand, is provided through a much smaller number of separate centres and is, furthermore, a commodity that can be furnished much more satisfactorily than food and clothing by public, as distinguished from private, enterprise. The administrative problem of organizing a bounty in respect of it is, therefore, considerably less complex. The case of insurance, though somewhat harder than that of education, is still much easier than that of food and clothing. The housing of the poor stands, as it seems to me, in an intermediate position. ”

“ The housing question is very largely a personal question, and cannot be successfully dealt with in the wholesale fashion which is the only way possible when Local Authorities insist upon themselves building the actual houses required, instead of being content, and wisely content, to encourage others to build houses on proper lines, keeping themselves free to supervise and control what is done, which is after all their first and most important function. ”

“ I would call upon those who may possess cottage property in large towns to consider the immense power they thus hold in their hands, and the large influence for good they may exercise by the wise use of that power. ”

“ The recognition of this third element in satisfactory housing conditions leads inevitably to the granting of powers to some authority to limit the quantity of building permitted on a given area, and to control the building activities of individuals. It is as idle to expect a well-planned town to result from the independent activities of isolated speculators, as it would be to expect a satisfactory picture to result if each separate square inch were painted by an independent artist. ”

“ There are strong grounds for holding that the task of building houses is not generally one for which public authorities are well suited. [9] Private enterprise ought not, therefore, to be discouraged by the grant of public aid towards the cost of houses erected by town councils unaccompanied by the grant of similar aid towards the cost of those erected by private enterprise. ”

“ This statement is true equally, whether the commodity sold to the poor at less than cost is house accommodation, or clothes, or food, or anything else that they are accustomed to buy: and it is also, of course, true equally, whether the bounty takes the open form of a subsidy to production by private enterprise, or the concealed form of production at a loss by the public authorities themselves. ”

“ A landlady stands in a relation to her poor tenants in which there is possible immense influence upon character, and, through character, upon the condition of the home. Unfortunately, however, it often happens that the landladies of poor houses are degraded women whose influence is wholly bad. ”

“ The standards must be upheld all along the line, and any man or family which fails to attain independently to any one of them must be regarded as a proper subject for State action. The exact level at which the several standards should be set is naturally different in different countries. It should be higher, of course, in those that are rich than in those that are poor. ”

“ This obligation is enforcible by the local authority, and that body is empowered, if necessary, to execute such repairs as may be required at the landlord's expense. [5] When we have to do with a town which has always been, or has somehow become, free from houses unfit for human habitation, the adoption of this policy for the future need not involve any great difficulty. For not many houses could become uninhabitable in such a way that renovation was impracticable in any one year, and there would, therefore, be no danger of closing orders leading to a shortage. ”

“ It is a matter of the character and of the health of the people as a whole a matter in a way even more significant than the internal arrangements of factories, because it affects not the workers only, but also their young children. ”

“ Dilapidated houses, houses that are not rain-proof, houses in which the sanitary arrangements are inadequate, houses so made that there is no proper means of ventilation—the building of these must be forbidden by law, and, if they have been built already, they must, through law, be either renovated or destroyed. ”

“ In view of the fact that good conditions of life undoubtably increase the industrial efficiency of those who enjoy them, State assistance—granted always that it is so arranged as to avoid directly tempting workers into idleness—might, I think, be given in considerable measure before any such injurious reactions were set up. ”

“ When they have to delegate it to others, let them take care to whom they commit it, and let them beware lest, through the widely prevailing system of sub-letting, this power ultimately abides with those who have neither the will nor the knowledge to use it beneficially. ”

“ No 'invisible hand' can be relied on to produce a good arrangement of the whole from a combination of separate treatments of the parts. It is necessary that an authority of wider reach should intervene and should tackle the collective problem of beauty, of air and of light, as those other collective problems of gas and water have been already tackled. ”

“ Working people were, in effect, paid money upon condition that they would occupy sites which, as their market value showed, it was to the national interest to turn to quite other uses. The antisocial congestion of the centre was thus made worse than it would naturally have been. It needs little reflection to perceive that a bounty differentiating in favour of such congestion is the worst possible form of bounty. ”

“ There advantage is taken of undulations of the ground, so that, when one walks down a street, one gets a view between the houses—a view generally embracing greenery and trees. There too, even the smaller houses are not machine-made to a pattern, but have individual character, possess gardens, and are situated near large open spaces of green. ”

“ Sympathy, guidance and instruction by Health visitors and others may often enable them, without any additional expense, greatly to improve their lot. A like statement is true in a pre-eminent degree of certain elements of satisfactory housing. ”

“ If differentiation is introduced at all, it should favour dispersion, whether directly by way of grants towards the building of cottages in the outer ring, or indirectly by the subsidizing of cheap workmen's trains and trams. ”

“ No such plea must be admitted as that, if a man is allowed to work excessive hours, or to live in a cheap and ruinous house, he will be able to attain independently to the required minima in all other departments of life. ”

“ For this position a good defence can, in many instances, be made upon grounds of economy; for expenditure of State moneys, so arranged as to maintain the efficiency of the poor, may often be profitable expenditure. ”

“ All that is needed is strict official supervision and inspection, such as is provided for in the seventeenth section of the Act of 1909, and in the actual conduct of which considerable progress is said, in the latest official report, to have been made in most districts of this country. ”

“ The case is, however, more difficult in towns where the initiation of reform is confronted by the existence of a large number of houses unfit for habitation. Here the medical officers know that, if they condemn these houses, a considerable number of persons may be rendered altogether homeless. There is no analogous difficulty as regards the condemnation of bad food. ”

“ A policy on these general lines is pursued by the London County Council in respect of houses managed by them. They have a rule that, among their tenants, "the standard of two persons a room must not be exceeded by more than one child under three years." Annual inspection secures that a change shall be made when natural increase passes beyond these limits ”