214.—(1) A local authority herein-after mentioned whose district includes a seaport may, with the approval of the Board of Trade, make byelaws relating to seamen’s lodging-houses in their district, and those byelaws shall be binding upon all persons keeping houses in which seamen are lodged and upon the owners thereof and persons employed therein.

(2) The byelaws shall amongst other things provide for the licensing, inspection, and sanitary conditions of seamen’s lodging-houses, for the publication of the fact of a house being licensed, for the due execution of the byelaws, for preventing the obstruction of persons engaged in securing that execution, for the preventing of persons not duly licensed holding themselves out as keeping or purporting to keep licensed houses, and for the exclusion from licensed houses of persons of improper character, and shall impose sufficient fines not exceeding fifty pounds for the breach of any byelaw.

(3) The byelaws shall come into force from a date therein named, and shall be published in the London Gazette and in one newspaper at the least circulating in the district, and designated by the Board of Trade.

(4) If the local authority do not within a time in each case named by the Board of Trade make, revoke, or alter, any byelaws under this section, the Board of Trade may do so.

(5) Whenever Her Majesty in Council orders that in any district or any part thereof none but persons duly licensed in pursuance of byelaws under this section shall keep seamen’s lodging-houses or let lodgings to seamen from a date therein named, a person acting in contravention of that order shall for each offence be liable to a fine not exceeding one hundred pounds.

(6) A local authority may defray all expenses incurred in the execution of this section out of any funds at their disposal as sanitary authority, and fines recovered for a contravention of this section or of any byelaw under this section shall be paid to such authority and added to those funds.

(7) In this section the expression “ local authority ” means in the administrative county of London the county council, and elsewhere in England the local authority under the Public Health Acts, and in Scotland the local authority under the Public Health (Scotland) Act, 1867, and the Acts amending the same, and in Ireland the local authority under the Public Health (Ireland) Act, 1878, and the expression “ district ” means the area under the authority of such local authority.