Housing and planning regulation – England and Ireland

• Author: Francine Baker
• Position: Department of the Built Environment, London South Bank University, London, UK

1 Introduction

A workable planning system for the use of land is generally considered essential to ensure an efficient and sustainable community and nation. This requires that sufficient numbers of appropriately located buildings and structures including homes, schools, hospitals, transport and utilities are built according to sanitary and safe standards. However, housing in the early nineteenth century in Great Britain was generally unsanitary, unplanned and left to market forces. This paper will show that this situation gradually began to change in the nineteenth century, due to the emergence of the government's recognition for the need for public health regulation. It will discuss how further later improvements in the quality of housing in the early twentieth century were assisted by the recognition of the need for the use of planning principles and legislation.

This paper will focus on the relationship between such developments in England and Ireland (Ireland was part of the Union of Great Britain and Ireland from 1800 until 1927. The Anglo-Irish Treaty of December 1921 gave Southern Ireland dominion status within the Commonwealth. It was then referred to as the Irish Free State. It was not until the Republic of Ireland Act¹ that the remaining constitutional role of the British monarchy ended with the repeal of the 1936 External Relations Act²). This paper will then outline their connection to the development of a centralized system of planning. This paper understands a centralised system of regulation in broad terms, to refer to the concentration of decision-making and for the formulation national policies in a central authority. It understands a decentralized system of regulation involves the delegation of authority to make final decisions to lower levels of management, however, the degree of centralization or decentralization of systems of regulation varies, depending on the extent of the distribution of final decision-making authority throughout all levels of the system ( Grindle et al., 2007 ). This paper will then outline the current change to a decentralized planning system, in the form of the Localism Act 2011³. The significance of this Act, which mostly concerns England, involves the delegation of decision-making authority from central government to local government, and indeed to the local community, for most of the financial and administrative responsibility for the delivery of local services. This paper will therefore also discuss in broad terms the impact of the Localism Act 2011 on the planning system and housing, which inevitably impacts on the construction industry.

2 Historical context

To understand why the regulation for the provision of housing began through the regulation of public health, we need to travel back over 250 years ago, when the wave of population movement from rural to urban areas began. The movement was, arguably, precipitated by the Industrial Revolution, which began in the UK, and subsequently spread to the rest of the world. The term was first used to describe the process of change whereby England gradually changed in the eighteenth century from a predominantly agrarian nation to an industrial one ( Ellison, 1968 ). It dramatically changed the way we live. For example, the role of skilled weavers was soon overtaken over by machines in the 1790s such as Edmund Cartwright's power loom as they could be operated by unskilled workers. In 1813, there were only 2,400 power looms in Britain. In 1833 there was estimated to be 100,000 power looms in Britain compared with 250,000 handloom weavers. Skilled craftsmen had to find other work, or become labourers in factories, often with a much reduced income ( Brown, 1991 ).

Accompanying this process was an increase in population in major cities. The population of England rose by 133 per cent between 1680 and 1820, and concentrated in cities such as London ( Livi-Bacci, 2012, Chapter 2 ). However, the distribution of Ireland's population did not dramatically change, as industrial and commercial developments were slow. It remained essentially an agricultural country. The population of Dublin expanded rapidly later from around 1850 as a result of industrial development and poverty and famine in rural areas ( Livi-Bacci, 2012, p. 21 ).

The rapid increase in population in cities brought many problems. Factories and houses sprang up side by side without any attempt at zoning because planning regulations did not exist. There was virtually no control over the standards of building construction and sanitation, or of health and safety. Drainage was inadequate. The use of baths was virtually unknown as was the use of water closets. The poor were less resistant to disease and the overcrowded, damp and dirty tenements of the cities were a perfect breeding ground for smallpox, scarlet fever, typhoid and typhus and tuberculosis. Workers migrating to cities, and from Ireland to England, Wales and Scotland carried disease with them. Human and animal waste lay in the streets and ran through them, flowing into water reserves or contaminating the wells from which people collected their drinking water. This encouraged the spread of disease. It was not until 1859 that work began on building a system of sewers for the whole city of London, and it was not completed until 1875 ( Halliday, 1999, pp. 66, 87, 98 ). In Dublin, Ireland a network of sewers was not commenced until 1892, and completed in 1906 ( Brown, 1991, p. 27 ).

Migration from Ireland to England played a role in determining regional differences in the rate of population growth within each of England's cities. For example, most of the stall-holders in Manchester in 1840 were apparently Irish; and over 280,000 Irish immigrants arrived in Liverpool in 1846, though 123,000 later emigrated to other countries⁴. The population of Ireland decreased from a healthy 6,528,799 in 1841 to 3,870,020 in 1881, down to 3,221,823 million in 1901 – a drop of over three million ( Brown, 1991, p. 22 ), whereas the population of England almost doubled from 16,769,400 million in 1851 to 30,515,000 million in 1901 ( Donnelly, 2001, p. 121 ). Disease and poor living conditions contribute to the drop in Ireland's population, but this was mostly due to the effects of the Great Famine of Ireland, which was widespread in 1846 and lasted roughly until 1865. In 1926 the population of Ireland fell to 2,971,992⁴.

2. 1 Early regulation of public health

Public outcry on the inadequate regulation of the quality of housing, sanitation and buildings came from various groups and individuals, such as Edwin Chadwick in England, who led the Royal Commission of Enquiry in 1832 on the current poor laws in England⁵. A major criticism of the report was that the current poor law had been left to be organised at a local level, and that there was no central authority to administer the law to prevent variations in implementation. The Poor Law Amendment Act 1834 was supposed to remedy this, replacing the old poor laws with a national system for dealing with poverty and relief based around the union workhouse. This was a significant development, as it required greater state intervention, however its effective implementation was hampered by opposition to the costs involved ( Englander, 1998, p. 14 ).

Strongly influenced by the Amendment Act of 1834, the first Irish Poor Law Act was passed in 1838 ( Gray, 2009, pp. 313-315 ). The English workhouse system was consequently extended to Ireland with a workhouse to be set up in each of the 130 unions in Ireland. Although the circumstances giving rise to the English poor laws were different from those in Ireland, where the poor were mostly poor due to lack of available work and disease, this was not taken into account. By spring 1847, the price of potatoes had reached four times their pre-blight norm, and grain prices also rose ( Ó'Gráda, 1995, pp., 2-6, 38-48, 56 ). Many of the labour force and poor were evicted from their homes, especially between 1849 and 1854, by landlords who could not afford the relief charges cast on them by the British Government. The poor laws were inadequate to cope with the scale of homeless and starving ( Kinealy, 1997, pp. 125-128 ).

It was argued by Chadwick, in his landmark 1842 report, that improving the health of the working class would directly benefit the nation as a whole, as it could not work efficiently in an expanding industrial economy, due to poverty and poor health. The author insisted that ensuring adequate sewerage, fresh water, waste collection and drainage were public health priorities ( Chadwick, 1843 ). This theory was not greeted enthusiastically by the government ministers, but following Chadwick's report, and public pressure, in particular, from Health of Towns Association ( Patterson, 1948 ), Britain's first Public Health Act was passed in 1848. It established a General Board of Health, with powers to create a local board where a town did not have corporation status. The local boards' role was to ensure that both new and existing houses were provided with water and appropriately located drainage. The finance...