Housing, Town Planning, &c. Act 1919


The Housing, Town Planning, &c. Act 1919 was an Act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. It was also known as the Addison Act after Minister of Health, Dr Christopher Addison, the then-Minister for Housing. The Act was passed to allow the building of new houses after the First World War, and marked the start of a long twentieth-century tradition of state-owned housing in planned council estates.

Background

The 1919 Act followed on from the Town Planning Act 1909 and the 1917 Tudor Walters Committee Report into the provision of housing in the United Kingdom; the latter commissioned by Parliament with a view to post-war construction. In part, this was a response to the shocking lack of fitness amongst many recruits during World War One, attributed to poor living conditions; a belief summed up in a housing poster of the period "you cannot expect to get an A1 population out of C3 homes" referring to military fitness classifications of the period.

Content

It provided subsidies to local authorities and aimed to help finance the construction of 500,000 houses within three years.
Section 41 provided that the London County Council could build houses outside the County of London. This provision was used to build 'out-county' estates, such as Becontree.
Not all of the funding was ultimately made available and only 213,800 homes were built under the 1919 Act scheme. However, under the provisions of successive housing Acts between 1919 and 1939 local authorities built a total of 1.1 million homes.