160 ADDENDA TO THE MINORITY REPORT 



ployment in the building trade is encouraging, and 

 the principle it embodies of adjusting finance to 

 industrial needs is one which should be extended 

 to rural housing. Unemployment in the building 

 trade is not to be compared for gravity to the nation's 

 need of maintaining and increasing employment in 

 agriculture. Let us, then, assume that with the help 

 of the State bonus the rent of the new cottages will 

 be 68. 6d. a week. Writing off the bonus required 

 by the peculiar and temporary war conditions, we 

 may regard Qs. 6d. as the economic rent of the future 

 cottages so far as we are able to see ahead. 



Now, one of the greatest practical difficulties, as 

 we have seen, will be the presence side by side in 

 every village throughout the country of old houses 

 let at, say. Is. 6d. a week, and the new houses let 

 at 6s. 6d. a week. If supply and demand had been 

 allowed to operate freely in the past, the rents of 

 the existing houses would have gone up as the scarcity 

 increased, but agricultural wages have been low, and 

 landowners and farmers alike have habitually accepted 

 the uneconomic rent with which we are familiar. It 

 is partly, perhaps chiefly, that fact which has deterred 

 the private builder from building cottages as a com- 

 mercial proposition. And so long as economic rents 

 are unobtainable, private enterprise will continue to 

 hold itself aloof. Once wages are raised to a level 

 which will really leave enough weekly margin to pay 

 the 65. 6d. a week of the new houses, the tendency of 

 the rent of the old houses to remain below the economic 

 level will cease, and gradually the rents of aU cottages 

 will approximate to their value as measured by their 



