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. By 1951 the EFM housing programme and its offshoots had created one million new council houses, resulting in 15 per cent of all the dwellings in Britain being state-owned, more than the proportion in the Soviet Union at that time. Standards The Ministry of Works created research institutes, standards and competition authorities that resulted in core building regulations. All approved prefab units had to have a minimum floor space of , and be a maximum of wide to allow for transportation by road. The most innovative creation of the Ministry of Works was what was termed the "service unit," something which they initially specified all designs had to include. A service unit was a combined back-to-back prefabricated kitchen that backed onto a bathroom, pre-built in a factory to an agreed size. It meant that the unsightly water pipes, waste pipes and electrical distribution were all in the same place, and hence easy to install. The service unit also contained a number of innovations for occupants. The house retained a coal fire, but it contained a back boiler to create both central heating as well as a constant supply of hot water. For a country used to the rigours of the outside lavatory and tin bath, the bathroom included a flushing toilet and man-sized bath with hot running water. In the kitchen were housed such modern luxuries as a built-in oven, refrigerator and Baxi water heater, which only later became commonplace in all residential accommodating. All prefabs under the housing act came pre-decorated in magnolia, with gloss-green on all additional wood, including the door trimmings and skirting boards. To speed construction many were developed on the side of municipal parks and green belts, giving their residents, who had most often come from cramped shared rooms in inner cities, the feeling of living in the rural countryside. Temporary Housing Programme The Ministry of Works built a small estate off Edward Road, Northolt, in 1944 to demonstrate to the construction industry, parliament and the media the principles of their standards, and show that houses and flats could be built