FAIR RENT.

Ashburton Guardian, Volume xxix, Issue 7241, 29 July 1907, Page 4

FAIR RENT.

In replying to a deputation from the Waterside Workers' Union in Wellington the other day, the Minister of Labour (reports the Post) said: "A Fair Rent Bill could, of course, be brought down, but he did not know that it would improve matters much. The rent would 'always be fixed on the amount the house would produce, and in Wellington, for instance, a Fair Rent Bill would simply fix the rent on the value of the land, and they could not make the conditions otherwise. The best way to regulate rent was by tho erection of workers' homes. He had twelve going up in Coromandel Street, Wellington, and he would be able to show them an object lesson as to rentals in this city as well as out of it, because he would be able _to give a six-roomed house, fitted up with all conveniences, with land debited at £lg, a foot, at 14s Id per week, and a five-roomed house at less. That was what he hoped to be able to do in other towns also. He pointed out that he could not give a cheap home unless the maximum amount for the section was £80; if ho expended £350 on the house, that, with fencing, etc., ran the capital value up to £450. Since he came into office he had only bought three and a half acres of land, and he had sufficient land left to go on building. As a matter of fact, he handed over 250 acres of land at the Upper Hutt to the Land for Settlements Board, as he saw no chance of utilising it for workmen's homes for twenty years. He was going to go in less for ornamentation in'the dwellings, and he believed that the prosecution of the scheme would do more to make rents fair than anything else. If the workers demanded them ho would build thirty or forty or fifty houses every year, but he could not build in more than ono place at a time, because he now had an architect for, the scheme, who drew plans, laid out the ground, and supervised the erection of tbe buildings, so that when, say, he was in Wellington, he could not be anywhere else.