HOUSING IN BRITAIN

Evening Post, Volume CXIII, Issue 113, 16 May 1927, Page 13

HOUSING IN BRITAIN

(From Our Own Correspondent.) LONDON, 23rd March. The Right Hon. J. H. Thomas, M.P., spoke in his capacity of chairman of directors of the Co-operative Building Society at the annual meeting of'tho society in London. In. dealing with the housing problem, he said, he was very much afraid that, owing to the natural anxiety of all Governments to justify themselves, there was cultivated an impression that the housing problem wa3 “sort of solved.”

That was not only not true, but the working classes were still paying very heavily from time to time in many ways for the great housing shortage. The b I St io 1 U o th °*v tles agreed that at the end of 1918 there was a clear definite shortage of a million houses in this country. The best experts estimated that to meet the ordinary requirements there should be built 100,000 houses annually. The latest Government figures showed that since the Armistice to Nov«?nnn r l year ., there had only been 786,000 houses built. So that not only had they, not recovered anything of the mi J llon Y ar ' tlme shortage, but they had not built the number required for normal conditions. .