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when a room is 18 sq. ft. and the other room 18.5 sq. ft., there is no competition. The competition applies to the closeness of the empty room to the present room. For example, if the applicant is now living at the back of the empty room, he has first priority to apply for the vacant room. If overcrowdedness is on the same level, and if the family in the room behind the empty room is not eligible for being decanted, then the room which is adjacent to this vacant room has priority applied. There is further priority. For example, if there are two adjacent rooms, then overcrowdedness must apply and we have another principle to apply the competition, that is to say, if this person's overcrowdedness is composed of 8 adults, for example, 6 adults and 4 children; the other family has only 8 adults that is 8 persons, then we give priority to the person who has more in the family with regard to application of overcrowdedness. That is what we mean by competition.
MR. SALES: -Mr. Chairman, may I congratulate the Resettlement Management Select Committee for arriving at this complicated formula. All of us fail to understand it. However, we do suspect that it is a question of musical chairs with regard to empty rooms and people moving from one to the other at various times. (Laughter). Am I right or not?
MR. HU:- I can answer Mr. SALES (Laughter). In the Resettlement Management Select Committee we try our very best to have a waiting list to decant the people who are living in the overcrowded rooms, especially in the estates which are situated in the centre of Kowloon. We found from the experience that this waiting list is not practical, and it also wastes a lot of time of the administration staff so we have this new procedure which we will introduce from 1st March. During the interim time we will put out a lot of propaganda so that people living in the resettlement estates will know what the procedure is. Our various notices are all in Chinese and this is also to facilitate the inhabitants of resettlement estates. will be a simple one and will give more benefit to the inhabitants.
We hope our new procedure
MR. CHEONG-LEEN:- For purposes of clarification, Mr. Chairman, did the Senior Appointed Member go out of his way to deliberately bait the Chairman of the Resettlement Management Select Committee?
MR. SALES --- No, Mr. Chairman, I was merely trying to understand a very complicated situation and "competition" prompted me to think of "training" and I wanted to know to what extent these people had to undergo training in order to move from one room to the other. (Laughter),
MR. HU:- Yes, the answer (Laughter) is that management in Hong Kong is always a complicated problem. It is complicated, not only with regard to resettlement estates, but it is complicated with
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regard to hawkers because we should listen to the policy which is decided for us and we only carry out the details to implement the policy. Therefore, it is very difficult to avoid anything which is very much in detail because otherwise it would not be fair to the inhabitants there and this, in my view, is a simple and fair formula to be applied in the future.
MR. SALES: - Am I to understand then that the policy was devised by the Resettlement Policy Committee under the Chairmanship of Mr. BERNACCHI? In the event, would Mr. BERNACCHI please explain how it would work out in practice and what prompted his Committee to devise this complicated formula?
MR. BERNACCHI : Was it my Committee?
COMMISSIONER FOR RESETTLEMENT: - No, it wasn't.
MR. BERNACCHI:- No. I think the question has been answered by the Chairman of the responsible Select Committee. I think I am right, but I will ask the Chairman, by way of supplementary question, to confirm this, when I say that the previous policy was that the Resettlement Department offered empty rooms to overcrowded tenants. They very often refused the offer which meant that the empty rooms remained empty for months at a time whereas the present, or the future policy, is that the initiative should come from the tenants. The Resettlement Department will post up a list of vacant rooms available for allocation. The tenants will then apply and the competition is a competition as to which of the tenants are the most overcrowded, bearing in mind that, if the room, as the Chairman has said, is physically close to the room that the tenants occupy at present, they will receive a degree of benefit from that fact so that when two families apply of the same density, the room that is nearest one of the families will be given to that family. I think I am right, Mr. Chairman?
MR. HU:- I think you are right.
MR. SALES: - Mr. Chairman, I think Mr. BERNACCHI has rendered confusion worse confounded. Mr. Hu at no time suggested to this Council that it was a question of overcrowdedness. He suggested to this Council that it was only a question of which family in overcrowded conditions was nearest to the empty room. Now it wasn't a question of the family in that particular block having the highest density per capita. I would like that to be clarified and I am very serious about it.
MR. HU:- Yes, I will answer the question and clarify. I think Mr. SALES did not catch my words in the very beginning. I said "in the same most crowded conditions", that is to say, if the density of the most crowded family in one estate is 17 sq. ft., then those families who have reached the density of 17 sq. ft. with adults has priority
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