HOUSING, PORTSMOUTH (Hansard, 8 May 1951)

§ Brigadier Clarke (Portsmouth, West)
Tonight I wish to raise the question of housing in bomb-damaged cities in general and in particular I want to refer to the situation in Portsmouth. A lot more could have been done for these cities on which the main brunt of the war fell. We do not ask for money so much as licences. We want action and not sympathy. No doubt each of these bomb-damaged cities has a separate problem of its own, and I feel that if the local councils had had more say in how they could rebuild their cities they would not be in the parlous position that many of them are in today.
I do not think that anybody on either side of the House will agree with the principle that the Government have been upholding for the last five years that Whitehall knows best and that everything that comes from Whitehall is good. I think it was the Financial Secretary to the Treasury who said, "The gentlemen of Whitehall know best." I do not think they know anything at all and it would be better if the whole thing were left to local government. There is no reason why Whitehall should worry itself about these housing matters. If only they had been left to the local councils we would have seen no such thing as a Littlewoods department store growing up in Portsmouth. We never had one before the war, and although we do not mind having one there, people come to me and say, "Why have a Littlewoods when we want houses?" I cannot do anything but agree with them.
For the last four years not only have we had a Minister who obstructed anything in the way of housing, but a Minister of Works whose buildings had quite a separate Vote. We were told, in effect, "If you do not put up a Littlewoods you cannot have a block of flats instead." If that had been left to the council we should have had what the city needed most. It might be that in some places a bank was necessary, or in some others a block of flats, but I do not think that anyone wants to see a big department store going up when one did not exist in the town before the war. This 1914 is what we have had owing to Government interference.
Portsmouth, unlike many bombed cities, is an island, but it is different from other islands in that there is only a little water around it, and immediately on the other side of the water there are other councils who have nothing to do with Portsmouth at all. Therefore, if you want to extend outside that city boundary—and it is a very small boundary—you have to go for permission to some other council and say, "May I build on your ground?" Then, having spent a great deal of money on the land outside your own boundary, the rates and taxes which you might expect to derive from the buildings you have put up, go to help some other council. In a corporate or a communal state that kind of thing might not matter, but the rates and taxes of any city under our present system are very important.
If we leave the planning of our bomb-damaged cities to the central Government, we shall find that they will use a yardstick, as they have done in the case of Portsmouth. They said that while Portsmouth has 11,500 people waiting for council houses, there are only 400 people waiting to build a house. As we have been able to get only one private licence to every ten ordinary licences, the public are forced to put their names down on the city housing list and it is not worth while——

§ Brigadier Clarke
I am sorry, you have your own private session; I am not giving way.

§ Mr. Wigg
It is a question of fact.

§ Brigadier Clarke
I have waited a year for this debate and I shall not give way.

§ Mr. Michael Foot (Plymouth, Devonport)
Portsmouth will not give way.

§ Brigadier Clarke
I shall certainly not give way. If the hon. Member for Devonport goes on in this way, he will have difficulty in retaining his own seat next time. It is not so easy as all that, especially if he joins the right hon. Member for Ebbw Vale (Mr. Bevan). He will have to laugh that off.
In Portsmouth there is no large area where we can build. As the Minister will agree, a reasonably large area of virgin 1915 land and not a bombed area, is required to build a council estate. Except for a number of places where 20 or 30 houses in a row have been knocked down, the bomb damage in Portsmouth is spread over the town and does not lend itself to large-scale building of council houses. Of the buildings knocked down, nearly 7,000 in all, over 6,000 were private houses, including shops. Those houses were old houses, so that unlike those in newer towns, Portsmouth house owners do not automatically get a licence to replace them. They are not cost-of-works payment houses; they are value-payment houses and do not attract a licence automatically. Bue we should have a Government which could see that situation and help the bomb-damaged cities to replace private houses that had been knocked down.
I have the statistics for Portsmouth here. In the city, 6,070 houses and 820 shops with living accommodation were destroyed, a total of 6,890. [Interruption.] I do not know why the hon. Gentleman interrupts. Surely he wants to build houses in this country.

§ Mr. Wigg
We want you to tell the truth.

§ Brigadier Clarke
I am telling the truth. We also want to have a little more truth from the right hon. Gentleman the Chancellor of the Exchequer than we had tonight.

§ Mr. Wigg
Where did the hon. and gallant Gentleman get the ratio of ten to one?

§ Brigadier Clarke
I will go on. Since the war, under a Socialist Government, the Portsmouth City Council have built 792 traditional houses, 2,059 permanent prefabricated houses and 1,400 temporary prefabricated houses, 257 camps and 241 other dwellings: 4,749 in all. That number has not even replaced the houses we lost through bomb damage, quite apart from the fact that there should have been the ordinary replacements of houses which had gone into disrepair and for slum clearance which was going on in Portsmouth in the days when we had a Tory Government.
We have received the munificent amount of £4 million for 18 bomb-damaged cities. The share which Portsmouth gets is £450,000, which is just about 1916 the value of one departmental store. I have here many adverse expressions from various cities about their allotments with which I shall not bore the House, but no one is satisfied that the £4 million would in any way help. Southampton, whose representative is present tonight, gets £250,000, and Southampton says that that would not even start to scratch the surface of the problem.

§ Mrs. Middleton (Plymouth, Sutton)
That has nothing to do with houses.

§ Brigadier Clarke
No, that is towards the replanning of the cities and up till recently there were separate Ministries for these matters. Now one Minister is responsible for the whole of the planning.
Sometimes we hear that the capacity of these cities to build is held up because there is no labour. I can assure the House that there is unemployed building labour in Portsmouth, and there would be more but for the fact that the men have gone into other jobs. I have here a letter, a copy of which I sent to the Minister from a Mr. Macpherson, who says that unless he can get a licence to build 14 flats to let, he will have to put men off and lose his builders, who, after all, are skilled tradesmen, and the people who will do the building in the future.
On 30th November I was told by the former Minister of Health that he would see his way to helping us in building if we could show that there was a necessity. More recently I got the present Minister of Local Government and Planning to say that he would do the same thing. He said that if we could produce evidence that more could be done he would sympathetically consider it. On Wednesday, 2nd May, the local planning officer said that Portsmouth could erect 1,200 houses a year with the existing labour if we had the licences. Last year they erected 600 and this year, the current year, they expect to get 720 houses put up. The planning officer says that 1,200 houses a year could go up with the existing labour if they could get the licences and sites, and this without any interference with any building programme.
There is nothing wrong with the council in Portsmouth over this matter, which is what hon. Members opposite are always trying to say. Mr. Beaufoy, the director of technical services to the Ministry of Town and Country Planning 1917 said that Portsmouth, despite many obstacles and tremendous difficulties, had made great progress. We have done our best and we can do no better unless the Minister can see his way to give us the licences to replace these houses which were destroyed during the war. We want to build houses in every way possible. It does not matter how they are built so long as they are built. We do not mind what restrictions are put on them. We do not mind if they are a £1,200 minimum houses or not, or whether they are private houses or council houses. I am sure that the Minister would not say, "A council house is good for you, but a private house is not." If he does, then the Government must be mental.

§ Mr. Michael Foot (Plymouth, Devonport)
I think a great misrepresentation has been presented to the House tonight about the position of blitzed cities and the housing programme. The hon. and gallant Member for Portsmouth, West (Brigadier Clarke), has represented the position as if the blitzed cities had been prevented from building houses by the policy of the Government. I think the simplest contrast that could be presented in this matter is to compare what has happened in the City of Portsmouth in the building of houses with what has been done in the city of Plymouth.

§ Brigadier Clarke
Quite different.

§ Mr. Foot
I shall show the reason for the difference in a moment, but first I will give the figures. In the whole 20 years between 1918 and 1939 the number of houses built in the City of Plymouth, which is not very different in size from Portsmouth was 11,000. We have built in Plymouth in the six years since the end of the war, roughly 8,000 houses. That means that within seven or eight years after the end of this Second World War we shall have built the same number of houses as were built between the wars under a Tory council in Plymouth and a Tory administration, for the most part, in Westminster. There were temporary houses and traditional houses, but it so happens that the amenities provided in the temporary houses were just as good as, and in many cases better than those provided in the permanent houses under the administration of hon. Gentlemen opposite.

§ Brigadier Clarke
There was no war damage after the First World War.

§ Mr. Foot
I can quite understand that representatives from the City of Portsmouth are doing their best to hide from the people in Portsmouth what has been done in Plymouth. The difference is that in Portsmouth since 1945 they have had a Tory administration, whereas in Plymouth, for three critical years after 1945, we had a Labour administration. We have a city roughly comparable to the City of Portsmouth in which we have built, not quite double the number of houses built in Portsmouth. I challenge the hon. and gallant Member for Portsmouth, West, to come to Portsmouth and debate the housing position.

§ Brigadier Clarke
I would not bother to give the hon. Member a platform and the audience he would like. He should remember that there was no bombing after the First World War and as many houses as were required were put up. There has been bombing since and we had to put up with that.

§ Mr. Foot
Everybody boasts about their own bombs, and we have had as many and as bad bombs as Portsmouth.

§ Brigadier Clarke
But——

§ Mr. Deputy-Speaker (Colonel Sir Charles MacAndrew)
Order. I hope the hon. and gallant Member will stop interrupting. He has made his speech.

§ Mr. Foot
In Plymouth we have built since 1945 many more houses in proportion to the population than have been built in Portsmouth. The main reason for that difference is that in the three years following 1945 there was in power in Plymouth a Labour council who were prepared to organise the building of houses, to go ahead with the purchase of land and with all the projects for building the maximum number of houses available. That is why the hon. and gallant Member for, Portsmouth, West should go back to Portsmouth and tell those responsible for the government of his city during the past five years that they have grossly let down the city. I challenge him to go back and make publicly in Portsmouth the speech he has delivered here.

§ The Parliamentary Secretary to the Ministry of Local Government and Planning (Mr. Lindgren)
I, like my hon. 1919 Friend the Member for Devonport (Mr. Foot) want to bring the hon. and gallant Member for Portsmouth, West (Brigadier Clarke) up against the facts. The facts are that he and the City Council of Portsmouth are not concerned with building houses for those who can only afford to rent.

§ Brigadier Clarke
Nonsense.

§ Mr. Lindgren
They are concerned only with those who can afford to buy.

§ Brigadier Clarke
Has the Parliamentary Secretary been there?

§ Mr. Lindgren
Let me make this quite clear. The City Council of Portsmouth could have had 1,000 houses each year since the end of the war, and in fact they have fallen down on their allocation each year.

§ Sir Jocelyn Lucas (Portsmouth, South)
They had not the materials.

§ Mr. Lindgren
What Portsmouth have been doing is this. They ask for their allocation. We give them their allocation of 1,000 houses. The first thing they do is to issue 200 licences—which they can rightly do if their allocation is 1,000—for private building. In 1949 they built nearly 500 fewer Council houses than in 1948. We are not caught twice. If anybody catches us once, it is not our fault; if he catches us twice, that is our fault. Each year we gave a realistic allocation to the City of Portsmouth, and if they had wanted to, they could have built 1,000 houses at any time.

§ Brigadier Clarke
Will the hon. Gentleman add that they had to be council houses, and that there was not space to build them?

§ Mr. Lindgren
What are the facts? On the figures supplied by the City Council themselves to the Ministry there are—or were at the time when the figures were supplied in July, 1950–10,629 on the waiting list for houses to rent. Their list of applicants to build by licence numbered 355. That is a ratio of one in 30. All the City Council have been concerned about is to get more and more licences for private building, and they have not been prepared to go on with houses for renting. [HON. MEMBERS: "Shame."] The hon. and gallant Gentleman referred just now to a letter. Let me read one 1920 which the Minister himself sent to the hon. and gallant Gentleman on 1st May, which I am certain the citizens of Portsmouth have never heard about.

§ Brigadier Clarke
What letter?

§ Mr. Lindgren
One the Minister himself wrote to the hon. and gallant Gentleman in reply to a letter of his. It said: Portsmouth have over the past three years failed to use the allocations given to them in anything like the period during which the allocations were originally intended to apply, although they have not delayed in issuing the proportion of private building licences…. In these circumstances I should not feel justified in increasing the proportion of building under licence at the expense of the local authority's programme of houses to let to those on their list of applicants for houses whose need is greatest. My right hon. Friend's concern is housing for those whose need is greatest. We suggest that that ought to be the concern of the Portsmouth City Council, and up to the present time it has not been.

§ Brigadier Clarke
Absolute nonsense.

§ Mr. Lindgren
Perhaps I am exaggerating in saying that.

§ Brigadier Clarke
The hon. Gentleman is.

§ Mr. Lindgren
But their main concern has been to provide for those who can afford to buy. I say this again in order that the citizens of Portsmouth can know it, because the local Press will probably be good enough to give publicity to it in the area of Portsmouth. The owner is a Tory.
So far as the Ministry is concerned, if the Portsmouth City Council shows energy and enthusiasm in building houses it can have additional allocation at any time. We have always been ready to allow them 1,000 houses a year. But we are not going to increase their allocation on their record for the last three years. I will give the figures. In 1949, 914 houses were built in Portsmouth. Of these 572 were council houses and 342 were private enterprise houses built under licence. In 1950, Portsmouth built 285 council houses and allowed 219 houses to be built under licence. That I say is wrong when there are still 10,000 people on the council's list for houses to rent. If that is what the hon. and gallant Member thinks is providing houses for 1921 those in the greatest need, I beg to differ from him.
The hon. and gallant Member referred to the question of labour, and in this connection he is as much out in his facts as he is in regard to the other aspects of housing. I will give the official Ministry of Labour figures for 25th April, 1951. The total of unemployed craftsmen and labourers in Portsmouth was 180. Of that number, 124 were labourers, and that leaves 56 craftsmen, of whom 23 were painters. Of the remainder, 16 of the craftsmen were in transit from one job to another, so that there were 40 craftsmen genuinely unemployed. The unfilled vacancies on the list were 35 craftsmen and 29 labourers. There was no bricklayer unemployed, and there were vacancies on the list for 26 bricklayers. That proves that in trade labour, at least, there is no unemployment. If it is being misemployed, that is the fault of the Portsmouth City Council.

§ Brigadier Clarke
Is the Ministry directing people to building? Are they forced to go?

§ Mr. Lindgren
Our allocations are related to the labour force available in the area. It is the job of the local council and the local builders to use that labour force to the best advantage. All that the hon. and gallant Member is concerned about is that that labour force should be dissipated over a number of private houses being built under licence rather than concentrated and used effectively.

§ Mr. Lindgren
It is surprising how nervy brigadiers get under fire. The more I see of them, the more glad I am to know that we have some privates in the Army. The real thing is that our shots get nearer to the target than do the shots of those who have not been shooting at a target for a long time.

§ Brigadier Clarke
The hon. Member is shooting in the wrong direction.

§ Mr. Lindgren
Will the hon. and gallant Member go back to the Portsmouth City Council—

§ Brigadier Clarke
Will the hon. Member?

§ Mr. Lindgren
I will go with the hon. and gallant Member.

§ Mr. Foot
We will all come.

§ Brigadier Clarke
I will not have the hon. Member.

§ Mr. Lindgren
Will the hon. and gallant Member go back to the Portsmouth City Council and encourage it and give it enthusiasm for providing houses for those really in need? If the hon. and gallant Member can create that enthusiasm we will see that the council gets the allocations it requires for building houses for those who need them most, namely, those who can only afford to rent houses.