)
other and their pride in the community will be a slow process, but there is reason to hope that it will be a successful process. It will not even be very expensive but it calls for a very specialized and capable administrative organization. Some pro- gress was made during the year under review with the building up of such an organization.
75. The process of education starts even before resettle- ment takes place. When a family is about to be cleared from a squatter area the head of the household is told the simple rules which he must obey in his new accommodation. He is asked, for example, to buy a small covered dustbin, he is advised to whitewash his room, he is told what form of partitioning has been found by experience to be most convenient and healthy, and it is made clear to him that he must carry out no trade or handicraft which will be a nuisance or a danger to others. Thereafter the continuing task of driving these lessons home tactfully and cheerfully is the responsibility of the officers on duty in each estate.
76. This would be all very well if these operations were on a comparatively small scale. But the task is to integrate into the community a population equivalent to that of Plymouth, or Barbados, or substantially more than that of Kuala Lumpur. In orthodox state housing schemes it is usual for the managing staff to be at least slightly acquainted with each individual tenant family: in Hong Kong's resettlement estates such an arrangement would be quite prohibitively expensive. At the end of the year under review the ratio of managing staff to settlers in the multi-storey estates was about 1: 4,000. There is a good deal of clerical and paper work but every effort is made to keep the field staff out on the ground as much as possible. One of the main tasks is to ensure the prompt and regular payment of rent: rents are received by Treasury clerks sitting at paying-in windows in the Estate Offices, but the responsibility for ensuring that the settlers come forward and pay their rent on the due date lies with the Resettlement Depart- ment field staff. Apart from this the task of maintaining reasonable cleanliness within the settlers' room, in the communal
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