made for private commercial, residential and factory development in connexion with approved town plans.
Date for clearance
45. Any private land involved must be resumed, permit areas can- celled, petitions answered and compensation assessed before the land cleared. It is necessary to ensure that development can start as soon as possible after clearance and demolition of the structures, so as to avoid letting the land lie idle, which might attract further squatting.
Availability of accommodation
46. Constant liaison with the Architectural Office of the Public Works Department ensures awareness of the numbers, capacity and completion dates of resettlement blocks under construction or being planned. To ease the economic burden on the people affected and the traffic load on the Colony's already crowded transport services, people are moved to the nearest available estate. Resettlement factory accommodation must also be available at the time that factories are cleared. No area can be cleared until new resettlement accommodation is available to house the people affected.
Cultivation
47. If cultivated land is involved in the clearance, it is necessary to determine how long it will take to produce a large-scale survey plan, identify crops and pay compensation. The two latter processes involve liaison with other government departments. In addition to compensation, farmers or substantial pigbreeders cleared in the past have been eligible for shops in estates so that they may have an alternative form of liveli- hood but this privilege has now been withdrawn. The great majority of available shops are allocated as a first priority to shopkeepers who have been cleared and, as fewer shops will become available in future because all new blocks will be sixteen instead of eight storeys high, there have until recently been long waiting lists of cultivators and pigbreeders for shops in Hong Kong and Kowloon resettlement estates. These commit- ments will still have to be met, but pigbreeders and cultivators now cleared are given monetary compensation instead of shops, and the waiting list is being reduced. There are hopes of clearing it completely before the end of 1967.
Manpower
48. Screening, investigation and arranging the orderly resettlement of residents, shops and factories all take time. The programme must there-
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