Rural district councils were slower to adopt building by-laws than their urban counterparts. However, most did employ full-time medical officers of health and inspectors of nuisance so that some comments on very poor housing might reach the ears of the elected through their annual or monthly reports. Furthermore, there were 24 sanitary inspectors employed in the East Riding by 1903, this including those in Hull. In other words, housing was provided by the ‘market’, this without government involvement.
Further legislation in the years that were to lead-up to the Great War edged rural local governments towards the possibility of government involvement in the provision of working class housing (this both by the Conservative government up to 1905 and by the Liberal government 1905-1914). Workers such as sanitary inspectors, medical officers and inspectors of nuisance could recommend to the County Medical Officer of Health that particular cottages be labelled as ‘unfit for human occupation’, although the problem here was that to do so would make the existing tenant and family homeless without any provision for their alternative accommodation. Over the winter of 1913-1914 the County Medical Officer of Health for the east Riding wrote that ‘Wherever I go I hear the same story of young married couples having to live with their parents because there are no houses to be had anywhere or else leave the district and migrate to the towns’, and in the Skirlaugh Rural Sanitary district a shortfall of two to three houses per parish was deemed usual.
All statistics compiled by local authorities had to then be sent to the Local Government Board, an important national government department. On the eve of the Great War the L.G,B. required that the Skirlaugh Rural District should erect some three-bedroomed houses in 10 parishes, these including Seaton and Wassand (a ‘closed’ parish, Brandesburton and Skirlaugh (‘open’ parishes). So the moment had come, even in conservative rural areas, for local authorities to get involved in house building.