Manchester, Mar. 27.
Although it does not figure very largely now in the newspapers, the housing problem in the United Kingdom is still as acute as it has ever been. At a sale, a six-roomed house will fetch from £60 to £100 more if the purchaser can get possession, than can be got for it if there is a tenant already installed. If one falls empty in the ordinary course it is rare for it to be let without some device to make the in-going tenant pay for the privilege, although it is now against the law to charge "key money." The most common dodge is to leave or put in it.a few worthless scraps of furniture, and make their purchase by the in-going tenant for an exorbitant sum a condition of the} tenancy.
Most of the municipal housing schemes have flickered out, partly through the withdrawal of Government assistance, and partly through the reductions in wages making it} impossible for people of limited means to pay the Targe rents demanded for the houses. Not that there is any suspicion of profiteering about these rents. High as they are, they yet represent a loss to the municipalities on the capital expended.—Many—_unfortunate municipalities have also had to face rent strikes by the tenants, who find it impossible to pay 20/ a week in rent when the whole of their wages does not amount to 50/. As a result of slightly lower wages in the building industry there has already been a considerable fall in the cost of building but it does not equal the fall in wages. It matters little to a man whose wages have fallen from 110/, to 50/, that houses costing £1,000 to build 18 months ago, cost only £750 to-day.
There is every evidence by the great disparity in their quotations for the same contracts, that there is no building ring in existence.
All. the responsibility for the existing unhappy deadlock in housing must be shared in unequal proportions between the workers in the building trades, and the National Building and Engineering Brick Federation. The building workers are partly responsible, as they have persistently -stood out for wages greatly above the prewar standard and_ what other workers receive; confident that the need for houses is so acute that the community will have no other option than to pay up. The tactlessness of the Government's threats to dilute the industry with thousands of ex-servicemen ensured for the building workers a larger measure of working class sympathy than they otherwise would not have received. This side issue
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.