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It was therefore decided, as I have stated before in this Council, to prepare legislation which would provide some legal framework within which voluntary management committees or associations might operate. In particular, it seemed necessary to provide legal powers for a majority of owners who wished to set up such a committee or association in their buildings to be able to compel an unco-operative or apathetic minority to join in a management scheme, and to that extent, the element of compulsion is still, of course, not excluded.
The draft Bill, which has recently been discussed in one of the Council's committees, and which is now being revised after consideration by the various departments concerned, sets out to do this; it provides that a management committee may be set up when the owners of at least 50% of the flats in a building resolve to do so. If a majority cannot be found in favour of setting up such a management committee, then not less than 20% of the owners would be able to apply to the Supreme Court for an order to be made calling a meeting for the purpose of appointing such a committee. A simple majority of those attending such a meeting would be sufficient to appoint a management committee. Once in existence, the management committee would apply formally for the incorporation of the owners of the building as a whole; the corporation would then be able to exercise all the powers of ownership of the common parts of the building. The management committee would be entrusted with the day-to-day management of the common areas and would be able to fix the charges to be collected from each owner or co-owner. These contributions would be regarded as debts due from each owner to the corporation, and in cases where the Deed of Mutual Covenant provided that a person might sell a flat or register a charge against a flat if the owner failed to pay any sum payable under the Deed for management purposes, in such cases, the corporation would be able to exercise this power to sell or to register a charge. Moreover, if the owner of a flat failed to pay his contribution within one month of the due date, the management committee could collect the sum due from the occupier, who would be entitled in turn to deduct this sum from his rent. Management committees should therefore have adequate means of ensuring the collection of contributions. The draft Bill also provides that once established, a management committee may not be dissolved unless an administrator is appointed to carry on its functions.
The possibility of making provision for the incorporation of owners and the setting up of a management committee when not even 20% of the owners are prepared to apply to the Court is being explored, but the present view is that we should exercise caution in providing for a greater degree of compulsion than I have already indicated. From the point of view of Government itself, the draft Bill would also have the great merit of radically simplifying the procedure for service of various statutory notices. These could, under the Bill, be served on management committees instead of having to be delivered to all the co-owners.
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I hope that this brief summary of the provisions of the draft legislation may stimulate useful public comment. We shall, of course, be consulting a number of interested public bodies when the Bill has reached a more advanced state. I should like to add that this is one of three new draft bills designed to cope with the problems arising from multi-storeyed buildings in divided ownership. The other two, both of which are now under discussion with the Incorporated Law Society, would respectively enable Government to apportion Crown rent and premium amongst the individual co-owners in multi-storey buildings and would provide a means whereby action against breaches of lease conditions could take the form of vesting individual flats in the Colonial Treasurer Incorporated instead of by re-entry on the entire property.
Reference was also made to the problem of cleansing the commonly used parts of private buildings when owners and occupiers fail to keep them clean. You have suggested, Sir, that I might speak briefly on this whilst on the general subject of multi-storey buildings. It is a matter which has been raised many times before, and you explained the Government's position fully in a statement made during the Adjournment Debate in the Legislative Council on 23rd October this year, in answer to questions raised by the Honourable Wilfred WONG. The present position is briefly that when the dirt is so great as to amount to a nuisance, as defined in the Public Health and Urban Services Ordinance, action is taken by the Urban Services Department when this is practicable. It is not always easy because it may not be easy to prove who caused the nuisance or to recover costs from numerous flat owners. When the dirt does not amount to a statutory nuisance, it is the Government's view that cleansing should be by the management, and it is hoped that the new legislation will help flat owners to deal with the irresponsible ones among them. The cost of providing a public cleansing service would be very great, and it would be unlikely that the cost could be fully recovered from those who benefited from this service.
Moreover, the Government, with all its other existing commitments, simply could not make available for this work the large number of trained staff who would be required. What is more, this is only one, and perhaps in the longer term not necessarily the most important, aspect of the management of multi-storey buildings, which also embraces the repair and maintenance of the building itself, including lifts, lighting, etc., the responsibility for which should remain, in Government's view, fairly and squarely in the hands of the owners of the property. We have heard much in this debate about the desirability of encouraging people to run their own affairs, and I am sure this Council would be anxious to try every means possible to assist people to manage their own affairs in this context of multi-storey housing before advocating intervention by the Government.
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