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the Government should accept the recommendation of the Board of the Mass Transit Railway Corporation that the Modified Initial System be extended to Tsuen Wan as quickly as possible". Clauses 2, 3 and 7 of the bill accordingly seek to geographically enlarge the scope of the appropriate sections of the principal Ordinance by including stage 6 of the railway, that is the section which runs from Lai Chi Kok Bay to Tsuen Wan, to allow the owners of property affected by the extension of the railway to seek compensation under the provisions of the Ordinance.
B
The Settlement of Claims
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Section 21 of the principal Ordinance (the text of which is repeated for convenience in Annex B) prescribes the procedure for claims for compensation under the Ordinance. It will be seen that subsection (5) has the effect of requiring the Director of Public Works to admit or reject a claim within three months of its receipt. While this time-scale is normally adequate to deal with most types of claims under the First Schedule to the Ordinance (e. g. for loss of land resumed, loss of value of land on creation or extinction of easements, pecuniary loss on closure or alteration of streets, etc), it is not necessarily so in relation to claims under item 6 of the Schedule, that is for structural damage resulting from the construction of the railway. Claims for structural damage can be very complicated and, because of their complexity, they can involve the retention of consultants by all the parties concerned. Thus they may require considerably more than three months to assess. In these circumstances the Director of Public Works has no option but to reject the claims. This, in turn, can operate to the detriment of claimants who may be actively engaged in the process of establishing their claims and, in their own interests, may not wish this process to be prematurely terminated.
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Another pertinent factor relating to structural damage claims is that they are the only type of claims in the First Schedule which are also covered by the insurance policy that the MTRC has taken out in conjunction with the Government against third party claims for damage. For this reason, all structural damage claims are referred by the Director of Public Works to insurance loss adjusters who process and evaluate these claims. As explained in the preceding paragraph, such claims may require more than three months to assess. This could result in a complication since, if the Director, without the consent of the insurers, was to admit or reject structural damage claims within three months as required by section 21(5),
G.S. 84
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