§ 68. Mr. Freesonasked the Minister of Housing and Local Government whether he will consult the Minister of Public Building and Works and the Minister of Labour with a view to taking steps to gear a greater proportion of the building industry to the repair, conversion and modernisation of old properties, particularly in the big city areas.
§ Mr. CrossmanDepartments are already examining the implications for building resources of any given level of improvement. The kind of work to which my hon. Friend refers is on the whole done by small firms of jobbing builders, who are not engaged in new house-building; and I do not think the demands made on materials interfere with the building of new houses. But the evidence suggests that improvement makes disproportionately heavy demands on craftsmen in relation to output, and that a rapid acceleration in the amount of improvement work might accentuate any difficulties that new construction ran into through shortage of skilled labour.
The proportion of the total output of the construction industry taken up by house repair and improvement has been falling since 1959, but the evidence does not point to any similar fall in the proportion of the labour force engaged on this type of work.