A Constructive Housing Poliey
Building and Planning. By G D. H. Cole (Cassell. 10s. 6d.) Ma. COLE has a gift for explaining difficult political-economic subjects in pleasant readable English. Bagehot once complained that people who can write do not know about things, and people who know about things cannot write ; and this is distressingly true in the field of town and country planning. It is a pleasure, there- fore, to come upon this shining exception. Not only does Mr. Cole state lucidly the consensus of opinion on policy and methods that has grown up in town-planning circles since the Barlow Report as a result of five years of controversy. That is a service to readers who during the period have been preoccupied with other urgent matters. He does much more. He shows the connection between planning and housing policy, relates these to the problems of full employment and fills out his picture with studies of many com- ponent issues.
The issues of planning in the special sense—land-use planning— are in essence simple though in substance vast. The Barlow Report's policy of "decongestion and dispersal" from overgrown cities to communities of moderate size has been accepted by an all- party Government, and is the basis of the best of the regional planning schemes, including the Greater London Plan 1944. Mr. Cole summarises admirably the reasons for this policy, the means by which it could be brought into effect, and the problems that remain. Anyone who wants to get a general grasp of the subject could hardly do better than start with this book.
With special authority, Mr. Cole discusses the scale of the coming building programme. The policy of the Government is to secure the provision of four million houses in 12 years, which involves in- creasing the number of building workers to i millions by the fourth year. Mr. Cole's estimates for the short-term programme are higher than the Government's, and than those of other experts —for example, of Mr. R. L. Reiss in his important little book, Municipal and Private. Enterprise (J. M. Dent and SonS, 3s. 6d.). The difference, however, is one of pace rather than of ultimate requirements. Though 41- million houses were built between the wars we had in 1939 about nine million pre-1914 dwellings, of which, according to Mr. Cole, four million were already over eighty years old. We have a shortage to overtake, and after that an immense task of replacement. Mr. Cole holds that a large-scale building programme is necessary for the success of the full employment policy. He lays stress also on the importance of better housing standards and of the rebuilding of obsolescent factories as means of improving the nation's competi- tive efficiency. Difference of judgement as to the possible pace of building does not diminish appreciation of the value of Mr. Cole's carefully-considered figures.
Well considered also are his sections on compensation and better- ment, on regional planning machinery, on local government boundaries, on priorities as between classes of buildings, and on training for the building industry. The treatment is enlivened by the occasional flourish of a partisan flag, and no reader will agree wholly with Mr. Cole's solutions of this complex group of problems. But he supplies, reasonably candidly, the data on which the reader may arrive at his own judgement.
Perhaps the most characteristic part of the book is that which deals with the wider issues of governmental planning and control in economic affairs. Mr. Cole's lifelong devotion to a Socialist philosophy is well known • and in his political as in his detective writings, though he lays the clues fairly as the convention goes, he may be suspected of having chosen the villain before all is told. In this book, I must say, he approaches the problem with unexcep- tionable detachment, applies the law of parsimony to governmental intervention as if he were the sincerest lover of free choice and free enterprise. That should be the state of mind of every good political philosopher ; planning for its own sake, or even for the sake of a taste for order, is anathema. Perhaps Mr. Cole still finds a secret intellectual glee in attacking further strongholds of laissez-faire. But like it or not (and what normal human being can really like it?), the fact is that his attack on this occasion succeeds. I have reservations on the precise machinery he proposes for planning and building. It is, however, a merit in a writer that when he has analysed an issue and stated a problem he presents constructive suggestions for a solution. Mr. Cole's work is all the more effective because by crystallising the argument in definite proposals, which we may if we choose regard as illustrative, or may amend or reject, he brings home the point that issues are current because solutions have to
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