6
REVIEW
else's. A 'Keep Hong Kong Clean Campaign', centred on the Urban Council, is now being organised to try to achieve a fair face for Hong Kong before it is too late. An Advisory Committee on Environ- mental Pollution on Land and Water, which is a long-term and all- embracing committee with access to technology, has just been set up to keep under review the state of the environment as affected by major land and water pollution rather than by litter.
To those who are concerned with public health, environmental improvement and peaceable civic behaviour, hawking on public thoroughfares continues to be a serious problem and the Colony has yet to see any real progress. Statistics of unlicensed hawkers in the past have always been unreliable, but the present numbers of 46,552 licensed and about 11,000 illegal hawkers are greater than the total of 15-20,000 arbitrarily reckoned in the 1950's when the population was smaller-but even if, as some believe, only 30,000 regularly trade they are trying to do it in the same traditional sites. The provision of off-street bazaars and markets has reduced the number of street hawkers in some newer or outlying areas. However in the older parts of Hong Kong and Kowloon it has not yet been possible to provide sufficient sites and many small streets are still choked with hawker stalls, impassable to traffic, insanitary and a source of continuous inconvenience to every local resident in the neighbourhood except at the moment of making a purchase.
The Hawker Control Force, formed in 1960, has proven unattrac- tive to recruits of the kind needed and is only strong enough to operate on the Island where it has so far made a limited impact on the problem. The disturbances in 1967, when the Hawker Control Force was withdrawn and the police were preoccupied with the maintenance of security, led to a grave deterioration in conditions in hawker areas, which has not been recovered. This is the most obvious field in which the events of 1967 could be seen to have reversed Hong Kong's unbroken progress to better living for all, and it may be the only one where most of the ground remains lost.
However, the Urban Council and the Urban Services Department have worked out a new policy, which was endorsed by the Governor in Council in May 1971. It calls for enlarged facilities for hawker control, new procedures for licensing and the provision of off-street sites on a much greater scale. It will be some years before the new policy can be fully implemented, and the 1971 Mallaby Salaries Commission recommendations, important in all departmental con- texts, are very closely relevant to the success of revivifying hawker control staff. In the meantime, the Urban Services Department and