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Prefabs (prefabricated houses) were a major part of the delivery plan to address the United Kingdom's post–Second World War housing shortage. They were envisaged by war-time prime minister Winston Churchill in March 1944, and legally outlined in the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act 1944. Taking the details of the public housing plan from the output of the Burt Committee formed in 1942, the Conservative government under Churchill proposed to address the need for an anticipated 200,000 shortfall in post-war housing stock, by building 500,000 prefabricated houses, with a planned life of up to 10 years within five years of the end of the Second World War. The eventual bill of state law, agreed under the post-war Labour government of Prime Minister Clement Attlee, agreed to deliver 300,000 units within 10 years, within a budget of £150m. Through use of the wartime production facilities and creation of common standards developed by the Ministry of Works, the programme got off to a good start, but foundered through a combination of commercial rivalry, public concern, and pure cost. More expensive to build than conventional houses, the envisaged excess production capacity of materials was taken up at a quicker rate through Britain's post-war export drive to reduce her burgeoning war-debts. In the end, of 1.2 million new houses built from 1945 to 1951 when the programme officially ended, only 156,623 prefab houses were constructed.〔〔 Today, a number survive, a testament to the durability of a series of housing designs and construction methods only envisaged to last 10 years. ==Context== The combined impact of war and a lack of commercial high street activity creates many post-war shortages and resultant economic inflation, not the least of which is in housing stock. In post–Second World War Britain this was exacerbated by the German use of carpet bombing from great altitudes during the Blitz, which had a huge impact on both the volume and quality of available housing stock. Estimates at the time suggest that the minimum shortage was some 200,000 houses nationally.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title=A dose of morphine )〕 The result was the repeat of a strategy deployed by the government following the First World War, of a country-wide investment programme in a national public house building scheme. To tackle the problem Prime Minister Winston Churchill set up the cross-party Burt Committee in 1942, which sent British engineers to the United States the following year to investigate how America—one of the main wartime advocates of prefabricated construction—intended to address its needs for post-war housing. The outcome of the Burt Committee was that it favoured prefabricated housing as a solution to the problems. In a radio broadcast in March 1944, as the War in Europe was ending, Churchill announced a Temporary Housing Programme, known officially as the Emergency Factory Made or EFM housing programme. The vision was for a Ministry of Works (MoW) emergency project to build 500,000 ‘new-technology’ prefabricated temporary houses directly at the end of the war:〔 This vision and promise passed into law as the Housing (Temporary Accommodation) Act 1944, which planned to build 300,000 prefab houses in Britain over the next four years, with a structural lifetime of between 10 and 15 years. In fact just over 150,000 were built.〔(【引用サイトリンク】title= Prefab Housing - 1940s )〕 In contrast to the United States, however, rather than relying on private-sector investment the new Labour government of Clement Attlee, which had been part of a wartime coalition that successfully deployed large and efficient state production schemes to win the war, simply applied the same theory to the housing problem. The plan was also in part an economic solution, as it reduced the need for a post-war government laden with debt to have to subsidise commercial operations, a problem avoided by simply encouraging industry to work together to design and produce the paid-for buildings. The scale of the problem was initially grossly underestimated, and at the end of the war it was found by survey that more than three million houses had been damaged by enemy bombing, almost a quarter of all homes in the country at the time. Most of the damaged stock was in London and the south east, particularly in areas hit hard by German V-weapons. Although the building trade had taken a beating, with many of its skilled labourers killed in war, the recovery in labour levels was boosted by high post-war unemployment. The envisaged shortages of basic building supplies did initially exist, but were quickly turned around as the raw materials needed for construction were natural resources within the United Kingdom. By 1951 the EFM housing programme and its offshoots had created one million new council houses, resulting in 15% of all the dwellings in Britain being state-owned, more than the proportion in the Soviet Union at that time.〔 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Prefabs in the UK」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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