Orders of the Day — Housing

Part of the debate – in the House of Commons at 12:00 am on 28 July 1947.

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Photo of Mr Ronald Mackay Mr Ronald Mackay , Kingston upon Hull North West 12:00, 28 July 1947

I am not forgetting that. I represent in this House a city which wants 12,000 houses. They are badly needed, and the conditions are just as bad as those in the district to which the hon. Lady referred. They are conditions which ought not to be tolerated in these days. But to provide Hull with 12,000 houses in a year we should build something in the vicinity of two million houses in the country as a whole. We must widen the perspective, and realise that it must be taken in relation to the problem as a whole, and not as an individual problem. We have to ask ourselves what quantity of houses can be built in a year. We never got up to the 360,000 total until 1935, and no one will suggest today that we can get that figure at the present time with the available materials which exist.

The speech of the hon. Member for Hertford (Mr. Walker-Smith) was more in the nature of generalisations than reality. He suggested six prescriptions as what he would do if he were in power. May I say without any disrespect to the hon. Member, that I am very grateful, and I am sure the country is grateful, that he is not Minister of Health. I would like to take the Committee through his proposals one by one to see if there is any substance or reality in any of them. There is only one of the six which really merits consideration. First, he wants to review the whole machinery for forms and licences. He thinks that if we could relax controls on materials which are short, and get rid of this sort of thing, we should stimulate the production of houses in this country. As one who has experience of the building industry, having been formerly associated with a firm which had a large number of employees, I have yet to learn that we have any trouble from licensing or any great trouble in the housing problem due to filling in forms, if employers do their job properly in regard to the forms of procedure which are laid down. My firm built some 20,000 temporary houses and a large number of permanent houses. They have never had trouble in securing the materials available because they applied properly. The hon. Member for Hertford suggests that if we get rid of these controls and licensing, we shall improve the housing position.

Surely the problem of materials is a much more real one than he suggests. Before the war, when we built 300,000 houses in a year in this country, we imported two and a half million standards of timber; last year we imported 800,000. That is a much bigger problem in relation to materials. If the Minister of Health knew that he was to get 2,000,000 standards of timber this year, he would know that he could build many more houses. This is fundamental to this question of shortage of materials, which is due not only to conditions in this country but to a shortage of imported materials also. If the hon. Member for Hertford, instead of devoting his time and eloquence to criticising the controls, would spend his time in suggesting ways in which we could increase the importation of timber, he would be advancing a much better prescription.

I was surprised to see that the hon. Gentleman who led the attack against the Minister of Health on housing, had not apparently looked at the schedule given in the latest housing report. One has only to look there to see how short we are of bricks, cement and other products which go to making houses. One can say, as the hon. Member did, that we ended this war better prepared than we were at the end of the previous war. But that is not true. For example. there was only one-third of the brick-making industry making bricks when peace came. We cannot recover from a situation like that overnight; it takes time.