REVIEW
7
Kong's 'water-lift' is almost an epic in itself. It began in June 1963 and ended exactly a year later. In that time a total of 23 ships made 1,371 round trips to the Pearl River and brought to Hong Kong 4,287,949,792 gallons of water without which we could have barely survived.
It is one of the hard facts of life that when some new ordeal appears, such as the prolonged drought, old problems do not politely stand aside so that we can direct all our attention to the newcomer. Throughout the water emergency there was no relief from the other pressures which our swollen population puts upon scarce resources. There could not, for example, be any slackening of the housing and resettlement programmes. There was, however, a need to re-examine the scale of our effort in this field and to make sure that our current programme was capable of meeting not only the statistical facts of the situation but its human needs as well. The public housing programme would do credit to a territory in much more comfortable circumstances. More than 900,000 people live in homes provided wholly or partly from government funds. But despite the achievements of the resettlement programme, which alone has provided homes for more than 600,000 people, there has been concern over the continued spread of squatting with its attendant problems of control. It was also necessary to determine whether present policies took proper account of new factors in the situation. At the end of ten years we still appear to have perhaps twice as many unhoused squatters as we started with. They have come not only as entirely new immigrants, but forced out of old tenement accommodation during the process of re-development or as a result of fires or house collapses. While the resettlement programme has always made provision for compassionate cases there was simply no place in the process for many of these new squatters. It is in the light of these new circumstances that the squatter, resettlement and low-cost housing programmes have now been re-examined.
The result is a revised policy involving a greatly increased building programme, new criteria for admission to Resettlement and Govern- ment Low-Cost Housing accommodation and new arrangements for those who are not yet eligible.
The rate of building both Resettlement and the newer Govern- ment Low-Cost Housing is to be stepped up very considerably. Building programmes for the next six years are designed to house