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2.
undertaken partly to free land for the provision of such
urgent needs as roads, schools and hospitals and partly to
remove fire risk, health risk and squalor. In the
pursuance of these objectives, the priority of which inter se has varied from time to time, squatter resettlement has
so far pre-empted a very large share of the overall Govern- ment-aided housing programme.
4. It is against this background that we must look at
the situation today. Much of the most needed land which
had to be recovered from illegal occupation has already been
recovered, squatter fires on the scale experience in the
1950s could not take place today, and conditions in the
remaining squatter areas, which tend to be in the cutskirts
of the city, do not compare, in terms of squalor and health
risk, with those that formed the main targets for the massive clearances of the past. (In this connection, I sometimes
wonder if we would find these huts quite such an offence to our senses if they were the traditional leaf-and-bamboo huts of East Asian villages. Picturesqueness however is not a
measure of good housing: and a traditional leaf hut can in
fact be an even more squalid form of shelter than a reasonably well constructed tin cne.)
5. Conditions in the city's tenements on the other hand
are in many cases far worse than in squatter areas. Housing conditions for tenement dwellers, and of course for eligible
squatters in areas which do not need to be forcibly cleared, can be best improved through our orthodox low-cost public housing systems, under which those in the greatest need can be
deliberately selected on a rational basis for re-housing
by contrast with the squatter clearance programme in which,
since it is an enforced clearance, all who live in the area
to be cleared must be offered subsidised accommodation without
reference to their individual means (they are not all poor by any means), or their degree of need, or even their own wishes. 6.
In short, the present situation as we see it, so far
from calling for a further crash programme to resettle the
remaining squatters, probably calls for a change in emphasis
/away
CONFIDENTIAL