A MILLION NEW HOUSES.

Press, Volume LXIII, Issue 19162, 19 November 1927, Page 7

A MILLION NEW HOUSES.

♦ WORK OF NINE YEARS. I BUILDING COSTS DOWN. (raou eras own cokeespokdekt.) LONDON, October 4. Over a'million hew houses have been built in England and Wales since the Armistice, said Sir Kingsley Wood, Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Mines, speaking in the Midlands. During the last three years, he said, upwards of 525,000 houses had been built. Nearly 350,000 houses—and these were mainly'built for the workers of the country—had been erected without any subsidy or State aid at all. The million houses had cost, in many cases, far too much money. The higher the subsidy the higher had been the cost of the houses. At times, said Sir Kingsley, a parlour house had cost as much as £ISOO. One of the most hopeful signsof the hour was the reduction in building prices. Since the announcement of the lowering of the subsidy by an average of £25 there had been a "reduction of £36 in the cost of a parlour house, and of £37 in the cost of a non-parlour house. We needed cheaper houses to-day if we were to do justice to the poorer sections of wage-earners, who could not in many cases pay present-day rents. It was largely owing to the beneficent work of the great building societies of the country that, perhaps at no time in our history, did so many wageearners own their houses. The Government's business now was to turn more vigorously and effectively to one of the most difficult sides of the housing problem—the clearance of the slums—which had too long waited for effective treatment.