102. Estate management brings individual officers into contact with a wide variety of problems. At the estate level, these include hygiene and cleansing, hawker control, encroachments on open space, the personal problems of neighbours, and the attitude of tenants to public events that affect them. Delegation and decentralization are being increasingly emphasized, and direct liaison is encouraged with the Architectural Office of the Public Works Department, with the Police Force and Urban Services and other associated departments at a practical working level instead of solely from headquarters.
103. Information about rents is given in Chapter 9 and Appendix 4, and the figures of authorized population in the different Marks of block are shown in Appendix 5, already referred to. The principal duties of the estate staff include ensuring that rents are paid and that the conditions of tenancy are observed. It is, unhappily, the continual checking which these duties involve that make the most impression on some of the tenants. On their rounds, Resettlement Assistants have to watch out for any changes in the composition of individual households, whether by increase or decrease, and for any consequential overcrowding or under-occupation which policy directives require should be met by offering to transfer the family concerned to a room more appropriate to its size. The tenancy conditions are not onerous or unreasonable, the most important being that the rent be paid each month in advance on a set day, that the room may not be transferred or sublet, that it may not be used for any illegal purposes, and that no structural alterations may be made without prior approval. Shops and workshops have to comply with a number of additional special conditions, while restaurants, cafes, fresh food shops and workshops are also bound by the conditions of the appropriate Urban Council or other licence.
104. In most systems of public housing, the breach of a condition of tenancy may be followed, although it may be after a long process, by eviction. In Hong Kong's resettlement estates the practice is for the staff first to give a verbal warning; when necessary this is followed by preliminary and then by final warning letters. Experience has shown that in most cases a warning is effective, but if the final warning is ignored the competent authority has to decide whether the tenancy should be terminated and the tenant with his family required to quit. › During the year, 384 tenancies were terminated, of which 251 were for non-payment of rent; 16 for operating businesses without the requisite licence; 5 for unauthorized transfers concealed under the guise of
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