ENCLOSURE NO.2.
55
10
Your Excellency,
As it is the intention to pass at this meeting a Bill intituled "Prevention of Eviction Ordinance, 1938" I
wish to ask Your Excellency's consent that notice of this motion, which has been circulated to Members, stands good. It has not been possible to give notice within the usual time. As this measure is essential and an emergency one, and as it might be said that the reasons for its passage through all its stages are also pertinent to this application to dispose of the usual measures, I may perhaps be permitted
to deal with that at the same time.
May I also deal with the purposes of this Bill. It was forecast some time ago by the Rents Commission that some form of legislation in the matter of rents might be necessary and though, in the majority of cases examined by that Commission, it appeared that the landlord was raising the rent merely in order to get a proper return on his money such as he was getting in 1934 that is to say in order to
get back to predepression rates
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and much of the opposition
to that increase was due to the fact that tenants had been
enjoying tenancies at rents far below the economic level, even at that time there were cases where the rents had been
raised above the economic level.
The position has been growing more acute and housing capacity is now at saturation point. There are little more than 200 vacant floors in the whole Colony and most of them are uninhabitable.
Victoria and Kowloon.
When I speak of the Colony I mean
The court has no power beyond its normal powers in relation to possession; that is to say if a man wants his own house back and if he has not given away his power of taking possession by entering into a lease, he has the right to it and the Court must enforce that right. That is a terrible weapon in a congested Colony where a tenant is evicted and