SLUM CLEARANCE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 19 October 1938, Page 8

SLUM CLEARANCE

PROGRESS IN GREAT BRITAIN. Britain has just completed one fiveyeai- slum clearance plan, and has started out immediately on another. The picks and hammers of houserazers have hacked their way to the end of the first great slum clearance programme, initiated in July, 1933. But they have not stopped, for a further slum-clearance programme has been superimposed on the first. 1 The first programme envisaged the demolition of 280,000 houses. The second scheme is to bring the total to 430,000. Since 1933, more than 800,000 persons have been taken out of tumbledown slum houses and provided with airy new homes. A new era in rural housing has also been opened up by a new Act of Parliament, which provides a subsidy of £lO per house for 40 years for the general housing needs of the agricultural population. According to the nineteenth annual report of the Ministry of --Health, department in charge of building, private enterprise has been particularly active during the past 12 months. It “has been of increasing benefit to members of the working classes by providing a large number of houses of low rateable value with a growing proportion among them of houses for letting as compared with the number built for sale.” The number of houses built with State assistance during the year July, 1937-July, 1938, was 257,081.