Public Health Act 1875

• 1. Introduction

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  The Public Health Act 1875, catalogued as 38 and 39 Victoria, chapter 55, is an act of the Parliament of the United Kingdom. Its most memorable moment came not in the text of the law but in a retort. Opponents of Disraeli jeered that he was neglecting far weightier political reforms. He answered them with a Latin phrase: sanitas sanitatum, omnia sanitas. In English, it means health above everything.

  Why would a government treat drains, pavements and water pipes as a cause worth that kind of defiance? Reformers had been pushing for decades, so what kept Parliament from acting sooner? And once the law finally passed, how much did it truly force upon the towns it was meant to clean?

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• 2. Sewage in the Streets

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  From the 1830s onward, reformers kept returning to the same grim image: sewage running down the street every single day. In the worst cases it seeped into the rooms where families lived and slept. Filth on this scale was no mere nuisance. It spread diseases, and cholera and typhus were among the many threats of life in crowded towns.

  In 1848 the reformers won a small victory. A Board of Health with three members was created to tackle the problem. Its powers were very limited, so the board could point at the squalor far more easily than it could clear it away.

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• 3. Who Would Pay

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  A clean-up carried a price tag, and that was the stubborn obstacle. Neither the government, nor factory owners, nor local authorities wanted to open their purses. Behind this reluctance sat a laissez-faire outlook, a belief shared by government and public alike that official interference should be kept to a minimum.

  Reformers worked to wear that attitude down, and the change came gradually. By 1871 the Liberal Party had folded the Board of Health into a new body called the Local Government Board. That reshuffle would shape who held the machinery of sanitary reform when power changed hands a few years later.

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• 4. Disraeli's Social Reform

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  In 1874 the Conservatives came to power, and Disraeli had committed them to extending social reform. A Public Health Bill followed in 1875. The man responsible for drafting it was the Home Secretary, Richard Cross.

  Cross earned lasting goodwill from trades union groups in the years afterward. They credited him with "humanising the toil of the working man". Disraeli himself made sure the bill became law. That is why the act carries the stamp of a government that spoke of social reform as a Conservative duty.

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• 5. What Councils Had to Do

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  The act gave local powers a list of jobs, and the first was plumbing in the oldest sense. Councils had to buy, repair or build sewers. They also had to control water supplies, regulate cellars and lodging houses, and write by-laws governing new streets and buildings.

  People were needed to carry all this out. Every public health authority had to employ a medical officer and a sanitary inspector, whose task was to see that the rules on food, housing, water and hygiene were obeyed. Towns also had to provide pavements and street lighting, which brought the law out of the cellar and onto the pavement itself.

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• 6. The Houses That Followed

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  The Industrial Revolution had pulled workers into factory towns so quickly that huge swathes of terraced houses were thrown up to hold them. Many of those streets were built with no thought for water or drainage.

  The act changed the rules for anything built afterward. All new residential construction had to include running water and an internal drainage system. The government also stopped building contractors from putting up shoddy housing. The difference between homes built before the act and those built after it was stark, and a walk through a Victorian town could show where the line fell.

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• 7. Permissive Powers

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  For all its list of requirements, the act came with a catch that is easy to miss. The new powers were permissive rather than compulsory. They set out a model of best practice for municipalities, but in most cases it was left to each individual local authority to decide how far to follow it.

  The act also cleared away the older tangle of law. Section 343 repealed 22 enactments, listed in parts I and II of schedule V. Among them was the Public Health Act 1848, repealed in full, along with sanitary, nuisance removal and lodging house laws from the decades between.

  The act itself has outlasted most of what surrounded it, for it remains in force in England and Wales. Even so, it has not escaped trimming. Part of the fifth schedule, the portion re-enacting section 43 of the Public Health Act 1872, was repealed by section 245(1) of the Poor Law Act 1927.

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