TIME TO CO-OPERATE

Evening Post, Volume CIX, Issue 65, 19 March 1925, Page 4

TIME TO CO-OPERATE

. A promising attempt to attack the housing problem in a practical way was outlined to the ActingPrime Minister and the Minister of Labour by a committee of business men. yesterday. It is unnecessary to outline the plan here ; the details are fully set out in the report of the meeting. The general object of the proposal is to supplement by means of a voluntary organisation the work now being done with the help of the State Advances Department. The Department is a financing bureau; it does not build. What is proposed is a building branch, to deal with some of the land which has been made available by the Government's recent purchase in the Hutt Valley. It promises to introduce organisation, hitherto disastrously lacking, into the practical side of the housing problem. Though at present it is proposed to deal only with one group of dwellings, in a specified locality, the idea is one that can be extended, or transplanted.to wherever it may be used. The plan has evidently been carefully thought out by those who framed it, and it will be readily conceded that the community is under a debt of gratitude to them for what they have done, and for their offer to help to convert their hopes into reality.

It is refreshing to see that busi-, ness men have at last grappled in this way with a problem which has been actively discussed for many years with scarcely a gleam to lighten the darkness. Here is a plan which in itself is small, but which embodies the great principle of co-operation. Its success, if it is to bear real fruit, depends upon the mutual help of all who are directly or indirectly concerned with the building trade—the suppliers of material as well as those who put it together. Sir Francis Bell thinks it Utopian to hope that the unions in the building trade will co-operate in the effort to, multiply and cheapen houses for I the workers. It is one of the sad j signs of the times that there should be any ground for such a feeling; but unfortunately the feeling exists. Mr. Strand, the chief exponent of the proposal, told the Minister that Labour i leaders had assured him that : every help would be given; and Sir Francis agreed that "if plumbers, carpenters, and timber i merchants were reasonable, we could have cheap'houses." In a word, co-operation is the secret. The housing problem is a national emergency. It is pre-eminently an opportunity to display the reality of "service before self."