WAR-BUILDING COSTS AND PEACE
Proposals are stated to be under consideration for extending the Defence Works Labour Suspension Order to the whole of the building industry. Exact information on the nature and effect of the proposals is not available. It should be before action is taken, for the matter plainly affects the public. Builders and building workers are sellers, and the public are buyers. When the Government takes extraordinary measures to control rents, then surely any matter bearing upon the cost of houses is one for searching inquiry. It is by no means clear that the Defence Works Labour Suspension Order was an economy or efficiency measure. It may have aided the rapid construction of defence works in an extreme emergency, but we do not know at what cost. Certainly the public have not been given such proof of the publicly beneficial operation of the order as to warrant unquestioning acceptance of its extension to all classes of civil building. Moreover, there is a further and important point for consideration: how does such an order rank under the Stabilisation Regulations? Housing and housing costs are so closely interlocked with post-war reconstruction that the whole question 'calls for immediate elucidation.
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Bibliographic details
Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 39, 16 February 1943, Page 4
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199WAR-BUILDING COSTS AND PEACE Evening Post, Volume CXXXV, Issue 39, 16 February 1943, Page 4
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