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HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
In replying to points raised by members I will follow the principle of "ladies first" and start with a very valid one made by the Honourable Mrs. Ellen Li, who as it happens was also the first speaker to mention resettlement.
Statistical Information
She suggested, perhaps half in jest, that I would have been able to answer a lot of questions put by Mr. CHEONG-LEEN about the number of school-age children in resettlement estates not attending school, etc. if a proper analysis of my records had been available.
Mr. CHEONG-LEEN's questions on this and related subjects make up quite a fat file which I have re-examined. So far as I can trace, the only question of this nature which I was unable to answer was a three-pronged one in August this year. The first two parts of it related to children receiving subsidies from voluntary organizations. As I do not have access to the records of these organizations, I am not in a position to analyze the information they contain. The third part of the question was "how many primary school children living in resettlement estates are not going to school?" Since it was then the summer holidays, the correct answer would strictly have been that no children were going to school at all, although such a reply could have been misconstrued. An estimated figure of those not attending at the end of the preceding term would also have been misleading in view of the impending start of a new school year in the following month.
But I accept, and have long been conscious of Mrs. Li's general point, that there must be a lot of information on our records if only we had a quick and ready means of extracting and analyzing it. For this reason, and some months before the formation of the new Department of Census and Statistics, I started inquiries about the possibility of adapting our records to make them suitable for an analysis on the computer which Government will install next year. This is a field in which expert advice is required and the Resettlement Department has no such experts of its own. I understand that no progress can be expected until after the computer has arrived, local staff have been trained to operate it, and the more urgent requirements of other departments have been met. But members may be sure that we in the Resettlement Department will welcome a survey of our records as soon as the experts are free to carry it out. I hope the result of such a survey will be the eventual mechanization of our records, but am conscious that if such a change is feasible we shall still have to compete with other departments for machine time, and that priorities are likely to be decided by the relative usefulness of the information which can be obtained by this means.
HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
One Department of Housing
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Mr. LOBO raised once again a proposal which has been made on several occasions, at least since 1963. That is that Resettlement, Low Cost Housing and the Housing Authority should be formed into one single Housing Department. When the White Paper on Squatter Control, Resettlement and Government Low Cost Housing was published in 1964, Government decided not to pursue this suggestion. It was, however, studied again by the Housing Board in the year following its appointment, but the Board concluded in its first report that it did not wish to suggest any changes. So far as I am aware, Government has no intention of pursuing the matter at present. On the other hand, the acceptance of the Housing Board's second report does portend a marked change of emphasis between Resettlement and Government Low Cost Housing in favour of the latter, and this is a process which seems likely to continue.
Cooked food hawkers and restaurants
Other members were concerned with some of the day-to-day problems that confront us rather than with fundamental questions of organization such as I have mentioned. Mr. Kenneth Lo, for example, spoke about the problem of illegal hawkers selling cooked food, and referred to one proposal for overcoming it, namely, that light refreshment restaurants, or cafés, should be encouraged to serve simple Chinese dishes. This will be possible in the near future, but I shall say no more as the Vice-Chairman will be speaking on this subject later this afternoon.
We are also approaching the problem of cooked food hawking from another angle. The Resettlement Policy Select Committee has recently given its blessing to draft amendments of the Resettlement Ordinance and Regulations which will enable the tenants of restaurants in Marks I, II and III blocks to provide a simple overhead cover for outside seating in front of their premises on payment of a fee. If the amendments are approved by Executive and Legislative Councils, they will, in many cases, do little more than legalize what has been going on without proper authority. But one may hope that other restaurant tenants who have not so far taken the law into their own hands will be encouraged to make similar arrangements within the law, where this can be done without obstruction and inconvenience to the public.
Some of the worst examples of cooked food hawking are to be found in the new Mark IV estates where no restaurants are yet available. Several restaurant buildings are under construction at Ham Tin estate, and if these are successful, there is reason to believe that funds will be provided to build them in the other Mark IV and V estates.
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