12 14 



Agricultural Housing. 



[mar., 



paying more in semi -suburban districts than the customary? 

 rural rent. 



This brings me to the maximum deduction from wages 

 which may be allowed for a tied house. Under the present 

 system, are you going to get equal treatment as between the 

 municipal and landowner builder ? Can you say to the former 

 that 7s. is a fair rent, but to the landowner that he can only 

 charge 3s. for a similar adjacent house ? That will have to 

 be faced. Or, further, are you going to say to the local authori- 

 ties that they should charge a different rent for similar houses, 

 according to the occupation of the tenant ? Local authorities 

 will have to provide houses for agricultural, industrial, rural 

 and semi -urban workers. Are they to charge the same rent 

 to each class or are they to vary it according to the occupation 

 of the tenant ? They obvioush^ could not limit their rents in 

 semi-urban areas to 3s. weekly ; but it is in fact clear that the 

 rent of new houses must be much above the pre-war level. 

 At the present moment agricultural labourers working on 

 the same farm are often receiving different cash wages because 

 they are charged a different rent, and as the deduction or 

 payment for rent differs so the actual cash left to the labourer 

 varies. Again, if more cottages had been available before the 

 War they would in many instances have been let to agricultural 

 labourers at more than 3s. rental. Lastly, if policemen, 

 postmen, and other rural workers, are going to live in these new 

 houses, the older and cheaper cottages will be available for the 

 agricultural workers at a lower rental, although I do not want 

 to limit agricultural labourers to these houses. We may, I 

 think, safely say then that 3s. was neither the universal nor 

 the maximum rent paid by the agricultural labourer before the 

 War. Further, we cannot draw a strict line of demarcation 

 between the various classes of occupiers of rural cottages when 

 fixing rents for a group of identical houses. 



I now want to say a word with reference to uneconomic 

 rents. Let us take, for example, three labourers each paying an 

 uneconomic rent. The first takes a tied house from the 

 employer. In this case the employer is in fact paying a part of 

 his rent. The man gets a larger wage than is apparent from 

 the amount of his weekly earnings. The second labourer gets 

 his house from the landowner. He is in this case subsidised 

 by the landowner. The third labourer is the new type of case 

 where the agricultural labourer rents his cottage from the local 

 authority. If the landowner is able to point to a considerable 



