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importance to these difficulties. He suggested, for example, that it would be perfectly reasonable for new members to specialise in their particular fields in the first instance.
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4. I felt constrained to say that, while I appreciated these difficulties, UMELCO was perhaps being too pessimistic about overcoming them. I suggested that the combination of such measures as the payment of allowances, the provision of interpretation, translation facilities by junior government officers (whose integrity it would not be right to question) and help from the present unofficials - not a point which any of them had mentioned would help. No-one, I said, had seemed to question the principle of widening the social basis of the Legislative Council and it was therefore incumbent upon all concerned to try and make a success of new arrangements. (Mr Primrose told me after the meeting that his own office could do a lot to help.) I cannot pretend that what I said seemed to make any impression on the unofficials and the conclusion I drew was that Sir Y K Kan (and others) remains as nervous about the implications of the proposed expansion of the Legislative Council as when the Governor wrote on 20 February.
5. The other matter I raised was that, of priorities in the various fields of social advancement. I said that my impression, admittedly after only a short stay in Hong Kong, was that housing was the first priority. The arrangements for medical and health care seemed relatively good (one of the Chinese Assistant Commissioners of Labour had told me that the cost of out-patient treatment, SHK1 per head for seeing a doctor and getting a prescription filled, was lower than in the UK), there were proposals for a considerable expansion of secondary education and the Labour Department had a full programme of labour legislation. An enormous amount had obviously been done in the field of housing but, I said, when one saw the Mark 1 and 2 resettlement blocks and squatter settlements, it was impossible to resist the conclusión that a great deal more still remained to be done. Sir Y K Kan said he agreed that housing was the first requirement among those I had mentioned but that jobs were what really counted.
The early
/resettlement
CONFIDENTIAL