Description:<a href="http://www.surburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1475">Arthur Neville Chamberlain</a> was elected as Conservative-Unionist Member of Parliament for the Birmingham constituency of Ladywood in 1918. He played a leading role in directing national housing policy whilst Minister of Health during much of the period 1923-1931.<small><sup>1</sup></small> The Housing Act, 1923, allocated government housing subsidies that allowed private contractors to build cheaper homes, whilst the Rent Restrictions Bill, 1925, capped rents at an affordable level and limited evictions. This was possibly designed to ease social tensions highlighted by a wave of rent-strikes that hit Birmingham and other towns towards the close of the First World War,<small><sup>2</sup></small> with a pressing need to build what Prime Minister Lloyd George termed ‘Homes fit for Heroes’ for returning servicemen. The Council reported in 1918 that 5,000 new houses would have to be built annually over the next 20 years to tackle the housing shortage.<small><sup>3</sup></small>
Applications for municipal homes Council were made through the <a href="http://www.surburbanbirmingham.org.uk/engine/resource/default.asp?resource=1405">City Estates Department</a>. Priority was allocated to families with children or ex-servicemen, although the scale of the housing shortage and the cumbersome application process meant demand consistently outstripped supply and priority cases could not always be tackled. Letters amongst Neville Chamberlain’s personal papers show that some ex-servicemen in Birmingham were requesting that he pressure the Estates Department to hurry their applications along, believing themselves unfairly treated. This letter describes the plight of one man who lived with his wife and two small children in digs in Winson Green and had applied for a municipal house at Alum Rock. He describes the cramped rooms the family occupied, complaining ‘I am afraid of the children’s health, they are in good health so far my wife keeps them in the Park all day.’
As an Irish immigrant, he, like several other petitioners, goes on to flatter Chamberlain by stressing his Conservative-Unionist credentials. He was a steward at a meeting convened by Neville’s brother, Austen, at the Round Room Rotunda, Dublin, and ‘being in the Loyal Volunteers I fought against the rebels in 1916’, Chamberlain’s father having been a virulent opponent of Irish Home Rule. Follow-up correspondence shows that with Chamberlain’s intercession the application proved successful. The letters certainly suggest the political influence the Chamberlain family still wielded locally, and demonstrate the increasingly politicised nature of the housing debate between citizens, Councillors and parliamentarians during the inter-war period.<small><sup>4</sup></small>
<font color="#666633"><small><sup>1</sup> H.C.G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (eds.), Oxford Dictionary of National Biography in association with the British from the earliest times to the year 2000, volume 10 Cappe-Chancellor (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp.934-55
<sup>2</sup> David Englander, ‘Tenants and Politics: the Birmingham Tenants’ Federation during and after the First World War’, Midland History, volume 6 (1981), pp.124-41
<sup>3</sup> Michael Harrison, Bournville: Model Village to Garden Suburb (Chichester: Phillimore and Co. Ltd., 1999), p.98
<sup>4</sup> Asa Briggs, History of Birmingham volume II, Borough and City 1865-1938 (London: Oxford University Press, 1952), pp. 232-4</small></font>