Report of the Committee on Housing in Greater London / Chairman: Sir Milner Holland. Presented to Parliament by the Minister of Housing and Local Government by command of Her Majesty, March, 1965.

Great Britain. Parliament. House of Commons. Committee on Housing in Greater London.

Date:: [1965]

Credit: Report of the Committee on Housing in Greater London / Chairman: Sir Milner Holland. Presented to Parliament by the Minister of Housing and Local Government by command of Her Majesty, March, 1965. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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$CHAPTER 2 LONDON SINCE THE WAR The present state of housing in London will, we think, be easier to understand if it is considered in the context of the recent historical background. This chapter is therefore devoted to a review of some of the major post-war events and trends, policies and legislation, setting the stage for the main parts of the Report. It is necessarily brief, and not all aspects can even be touched upon, nor can the full explanations which are proper to the subsequent chapters be given here. During the Second World War something approaching half a million houses in Great Britain were either totally destroyed or rendered uninhabitable and another quarter of a million were seriously damaged. In the L.C.C. area about 50,000 had been destroyed or so seriously damaged as to require virtual rebuilding. In the London Conurbation as a whole the total was 116,000, and in addition, 288,000 required substantial repairs and over a million more required war damage repairs of some sort. While the building of houses during the war years had not ceased altogether it had fallen to a trickle—indeed it was no more than a fraction of what was required to replace wartime losses. Besides losses due to enemy action the end of the war found a large number of houses in use for non-residential purposes—by the Services, Civil Defence and private firms bombed out of commercial premises. The stock of available houses had shrunk during the war years, but the number of families competing for them began to rise sharply at the end of the war, owing to the higher marriage rate, the start of demobilization, families returning from evacuation, and other factors. The Government of the day was therefore presented with an immense housing problem. To meet it there was a building labour force which had been halved during the war and the situation was not made any easier by the heavy demand for repair and mainten- ance work of all descriptions which had been left undone during the previous six years. Urgent measures were needed while plans were made for a more permanent solution. The first post-war task was the repair of unoccupied war-damaged property, which was the quickest way of producing accommodation. In 1945 a very large part of the depleted house building industry was directed to that end and over 60,000 severely damaged dwellings in Great Britain were repaired and made habitable. Five-sixths of these were in the London area. By the end of 1947 a total of 103,000 dwellings had been made fit for occupation in the Conurbation and the greater part of this work was completed. Another emergency measure was the use of the power to requisition property. From August 1939 the Minister of Health, and subsequently the Minister of Housing, had used his general powers under Defence Regulation 51 to requisition empty houses to provide accommodation for the bombed out. This power had been delegated to local authorities as agents of the Minis- ter and they used it widely during and immediately after the war, when it was extended to provide for the “inadequately housed.’’ Huts in former Service$