Council and the Select Committees, but individual appeals from members of the public are sometimes referred to one or other of the Select Com- mittees and it has also become customary for the Commissioner to con- sult the Committees on a wide range of questions. The advice tendered and decisions made by the Committees forms a substantial body of 'case law' for the guidance of the department.
CHAPTER III
SQUATTER CONTROL
11. The Squatter Control Division is responsible primarily for prevent- ing the erection of new unlawful structures on Crown land, leased land and the rooftops and kitchen rooftops of private residential, commercial and industrial premises within the urban area and in Tsuen Wan district of the New Territories. It also has other subsidiary duties which are mentioned below.
12. For the purposes of squatter control the urban area and Tsuen Wan are divided into four sections-Hong Kong Island, Kowloon East, Kowloon West and Tsuen Wan. Each section is under the charge of an Assistant Resettlement Officer, and is broken down into a number of patrol areas, each the responsibility of an Area Officer with his supporting staff. These patrol areas are further sub-divided into six zones, with the object of ensuring that the whole area is inspected once a week although this objective is still generally not being achieved. The Area Officer thus has to know his patrol area intimately, no easy task when each area con- tains from 1,500 to 2,000 structures and between 6,000 and 15,000 people, and covers anything up to 3,000 acres of hilly ground.
13. The function of the patrolling Area Officer is basically to see that his area remains 'frozen', that is that no unauthorized new building takes place. Structures which are presumed to have been erected before August 1954 or which have since been expressly 'tolerated' following subsequent surveys, are specially marked and records are kept of them. When the Arca Officer finds an entirely new building or sees an un- authorized extension to or conversion of a tolerated structure, he tries to persuade the owner to demolish it himself. If the owner fails to do this, the building is demolished by the department and the materials so confiscated used to help squatters and victims of natural disasters to build huts in controlled temporary resite areas (see paragraph 15).
14. During the year 13,310 new structures and extensions were demolished by squatter control staff, 709 being rooftop buildings, while
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