I beg to move, in page 43, line 10, after "times," to insert: or, if the house is occupied by an owner thereof and has been owned and occupied by him or by a member of his family continuously during the three years immediately before the date on which the order is confirmed, two and two-fifths times). Clause 57 recognises that some owners of houses which are unfit for human habitation by reason of inherent sanitary defects have endeavoured to make the best of the property, and it proposes to give special allowancs to those landlords, as distinct from other landlords who have allowed their property to sink into an unfit state without making any reasonable effort to maintain it. The amount of the allowances to be given is based on the assumption, in the first place, that an average yearly expenditure of one-fifth of the rateable value of the house is a normal incident of ownership and gives rise to no claim for special treatment. Accordingly paragraph (a) of Sub-section (2) of the Clause proposes that the allowance for good maintenance shall be confined to the extent to which expenditure on repairs, etc., has exceeded that fraction of one-fifth, or in other words, over a period of five years the extent to which it has exceeded the rateable value of the house.

The alternative basis of payment contained in paragraph (b), which lays down a minimum payment of one and one-fifth times the rateable value, has been put into the Bill to meet the case of small owners who may not be in a position to prove their expenditure over a period of five years. It is paragraph (b) that the Amendment proposes to alter in favour of owner-occupiers. If an owner-occupier has kept his house in good order he will be entitled to a minimum payment of two and two-fifths times the rateable value instead of one and one-fifth, as the Clause proposes at present. In addition he will, of course, receive site value, or will be left with the site of the house in his possession.

It is felt that the case of the owner-occupier deserves particular consideration in this respect. In the first place he is not a landlord in the usual sense of the term, but primarily an occupier. Generally he is a person of very slender means who has invested his life's savings in acquiring the best home that he can afford. To dispossess him without an adequate allowance if he has done his best to maintain his house in good condition, would be in many cases to inflict real hardship, involving, in addition to the loss of savings, the uprooting of a home.

The interests of the owner-occupier are, therefore, more vitally affected than those of other owners. But there is a further distinction. It is a fundamental principle in the ordinary case that an unfit house has no value and that the owner should not be allowed, in the interests of public health and decency, to offer it in the house market. But the owner-occupier is not in the position of having caused injury to the health of others in this way or of having profited by trading an unsound commodity.