LIGHT ON BUILDING
THE past few weeks should have seen a great clarification of the public mind on the subject of British building. When the Chancellor of the Exchequer announced in his Budget speech that the house-building programme would be stabilised at 200,000 houses a year for three years he may not have conveyed much comfort to the house-seekers, to the builders or, for that matter, to his colleague the Minister of Health, but he at least provided a fixed starting-point for future thinking on the subject. Then, in the present month, appeared the reports of the Working Party on Building and of the Productivity Team which recently visited the United States and the second report of the Girdwood Committee on the Cost of House-Building. All three, in their different ways, have been admirable. They have provided a great deal of inforination to British people for whom, despite the multiplication of centrifugal forces pulling the family apart, home is still the centre of the scheme of living.
All of this information about methods, costs, standards, enlightened planning and unenlightened meddling is of vital interest to the people at large, and much of it, quite apart from its personal reference, is fascinating in its own right. What is more—and this needs stressing—much of it heartening, revealing as it does the amount of responsible thinking which goes into building and the advances to which this thinking has led. There is no longer much excuse for confused thought and aimless argument about building and housing. The material for a balanced judgement exists and is available. And this fact con- stitutes a sharp indictment of the politicians who put up such a miserable display in the House of Commons on Monday. With minor exceptions none of the spokesmen of either Govern- ment or Opposition in the debate on the housing programme ever seemed likely to get away from the convention—the very old and very wearisome convention—that housing is primarily the heaven-sent bone for a political dog-fight.
Neither in this debate, nor indeed in the whole intermittent argument on housing since the war, has either party come near to a balanced and responsible view of a Very important human ' question. If the Government—not merely this Government, but any Government—tries to meet the urgent demand for more and more houses, it is readily accused of overloading the industry. If it tries to get rid of overloading it is equally freely accused . of not meeting its promises to house the people. If it sets high standards of building and equipment it is criticised for holding up the work for the sake of refinements, and if it lowers those standards it is accused of putting up hovels. If it publishes no programme it is attacked for hesitation ; and if it publishes a programme its figures are immediately treated as an Aunt Sally. If it seems to neglect the human aspect of the question it is called callous and if it mentions that aspect it is called hypo- critical. To state this situation is by no means to defend the present Minister of Health, Mr. Aneurin Bevan. The exchange of twisted arguments is a game at which two sides can play, and Mr. Bevan has always been perfectly ready to play it. In fact, as Monday's debate showed, he can play it with rather more skill than anyone in the Tory ranks. But that is not the point. The point is that it is a silly game, which ought to stop as soon as possible.
The job to be done is plain enough, and it is the business of all concerned, including politicians, to get on with it. It would not be true to say that in the matter of providing new houses and replacing bad old ones the sky is the limit, but at least the end of the process is well out of sight. For the time being the amount of building work which can be undertaken is quite properly limited by a Governmental decision- as to what part of the national resources in material and labour can be devoted to it. If the Opposition thinks that the figure of 200,000 houses a year is too low, then it is its duty to say exactly why it is too low, to specify which activities are to lose in order that house- building may gain, and to prove that the dislocation caused by another alteration to the programme—a type of dislocation which the Working Party found to be too prevalent in the past —is justified. A great deal or aimless recrimination about failures to keep past promises might have been avoided if both parties had settled down to make their promises realistic instead of making wild guesses about the possible and the desirable. Again the present fashionable argument about the possible lowering of housing standards might readily be settled if the wishes of house-seekers were sought on the plain alternative of an adequate house now or a hduse including several refine- ments later. Nobody can have it both ways. The Girdwood Committee, which knows far more about the matter than even the most vociferous newspaper, has plainly indicated that a number of economies could be made at once without seriously damaging the quality and convenience of local authority houses. The Opposition as well as the Government must make up its mind about how far it is willing to go in this direction. There is no need to rush to extremes. The scope for economies is in any case not large. But it is not negligible, and the safeguards against jerry-building are adequate.
There is the additional incentive to practical and informed argument that many of the problems of planning posed by building have a wider application, outside the industry itself. The question of " overloading," which was made the excuse for a great deal of verbal irrelevance in Monday's debate, provides a ready example. From time to time since the war the building industry has found itself quite unable to cope with the work it was required to do. Mr. Bevan chose to turn this argument back against the Opposition and to accuse them of contradicting themselves when they called for more building. But the real point is that the phenomenon loosely referred to as " over- loading " is, quite simply, bad planning. What happened was that there was no realistic co-ordination of the demands made with the materials and labour available and with the prospects for getting the same materials and labour to the right places at the right times. The result was failure and at times complete breakdown, for which the Government, as the planning authority, was largely to blame. And it will certainly not get rid of its share of the blame through mere juggling with words.
The fact is that the building industry provides an excellent illustration of the proper scope and function of planning. Any reasonable person will agree that the amount of building that can be undertaken at the present time is limited. The Govern- ment is the best body to fix the limit and also to lay down broad rules to ensure that such building as takes place does not conflict with town and country planning. But it is equally clear that it should not go straight to the other extreme and proceed to interfere in every detail of the activity of every builder. The Working Party report made it quite clear that there had been too much concentration on petty controls and not enough attention to the proper sphere of planning, which lies between the broad directions which have to be given by the Government and the day-to-day details which can be left to the men on the job. The report of the Productivity Team showed that we have a great deal to learn from the Americans in the matter of pre- planning, co-ordination and research. There is no reason why the industry should not learn these lessons, particularly if the Government will keep out of the light, stop fixing the proportion between local authority houses to let and private houses for sale without reference to geographical differences, realise that the right size of the planning unit is a matter to be decided on facts rather than on theories, and spend less time thinking up smart answers to Tory criticisms. The industry will still have to be held responsible for its own efficiency. It will have to act quickly to remove the reproach of a level of productivity still some 25 per cent. below pre-war. But it can do it. Some brakes on efficiency are being removed. Handicaps due to the war, frequent changes in the programme, scarcity of materials, lowering of morale, and the difficulties imposed by a regime of full employ- ment are all being overcome. The road is open, but building will always need the encouragement and the spur of an enlightened public and an enlightened Parliament.
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