REVIEW
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separate reservoir schemes. The figure has since been revised to $642.25 million.
On 23rd March 1960, Finance Committee approved expenditure for further investigations and for preparation of a detailed report on the integrated scheme together with the other financial com- mitments which this would involve. The year 1960 was indeed a year of decision, for not only has the Colony embarked on the early stages of the most comprehensive and expensive water supply scheme ever contemplated in its history, but has also committed itself for the first time to accepting supplementary supplies from China.
How has the Colony paid for this vast and complicated network of installations? The answer is that virtually the entire capital cost has been met out of the general revenues of the Colony, while both recurrent costs and the nominal interest and sinking fund instalments on the capital outlay are balanced over the years by the charges levied for the supply of water, fees for various licences and services and (where a supply is given from the water- works) by a proportion of the rates levied on the rateable value of property in the Colony. This proportion is at present 2% out of 17% in the urban areas (11% in the New Territories) for filtered water, with a reduction for unfiltered supplies.
The statement that virtually the entire capital cost of the Colony's waterworks has come from general revenue needs some qualifications. Between the wars two loans were issued to pay for programmes of construction, and after the Pacific War $5 million out of the Rehabilitation Loan were earmarked for expenditure on the waterworks: in fact, only $24,000 of this sum was charged to loan funds and the balance came out of revenue. There has also been some assistance from Colonial Development and Welfare Funds towards improvement of irrigation in the New Territories. Excluding the Shek Pik scheme and other major projects now under investigation or construction, the Colony has spent about $314 million since the end of the Pacific War on improvements and capital additions to the urban water supplies, over 90% of this total since 1951. Under the vast programme for improving urban supplies still further the first phase of the Sham Chun supply system has been completed which, together with the second phase now being planned in conjunction with the Integrated