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HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
If this rapprochement between the Government and the Council on housing policy means no fireworks today for the fans it does at least light up the dark sky for those people who hope for better housing at a fair rent.
However, I must sound one word of warning about when public housing under the new programme will become available to people who need it. It takes years to transmute a decision to build more public housing into homes ready for occupation.
There is an abundance of enthusiasm and dedication and a good deal of know-how and enough money in Hong Kong. But in themselves these things are not enough. A very large number of professional staff will have to be recruited for the new Housing Department and a great deal of detailed planning and preparation done. All this will take time. This means that given the best will in the world many people who today want better housing may not enjoy it for many years to come.
We are fortunate in Hong Kong in having a society that is patient. That admirable characteristic will have to be exercised even more in the early years of the new programme when the people's expectations for public housing are high but the rate of production cannot yet satisfy the demand.
I think these general remarks answer either directly or indirectly most of the points raised by Unofficial Members in those parts of their speeches that dealt with housing, and I wish now to comment on one or two specific points that were raised by Members.
Mr. Peter C. K. CHAN's feelings about the transfer of the Urban Council's traditional role in housing to the Housing Authority are understandable. Yet I am sure that he would be the first to agree that Hong Kong's capability in housing production and management has been fragmented for much too long. There has been a crying need to unify this capability and to home it onto a well-defined housing target. Yet somehow the determination to do this was missing.
Now that the necessary thrust has been given for radical reorganization associated with the new Colony housing target it is very much to the credit of Unofficial Members of this Council that they have accepted with good grace that their extensive knowledge of public housing should be deployed in a new Housing Authority with full responsibility for the whole field of public housing within the Colony.
Mr. CHEONG-LEEN has drawn attention to rich people in Government housing estates. This question is attracting a good deal of public interest at the present time and the Secretary for Housing made a statement on the subject in the Legislative Council on 15th November.
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If my friend has not already seen that statement I will gladly send him a copy. But it was proposed by the Secretary for Housing that the matter be considered by the new Housing Authority in due course.
It is understandable that fair-minded people should feel indignant at the thought that wealthy people are occupying subsidized public housing when so many really needy people are still living in wretched conditions in squatter huts or overcrowded tenements.
There are undoubtedly many cases where this happens—one would expect it in a tenant population of over 1,600,000. But the statistics we have simply do not substantiate the popular idea that there is widespread abuse in the sense that there are large numbers of people now living in Government estates who could easily afford to rent as good or better accommodation in the private sector. For example, an official social survey done in three Resettlement Estates in 1970 show that of 4,312 families, 3,000 had family incomes of under $800 a month and only 39 families had incomes of more than $2,000 a month. In Shek Kip Mei, where there are 10,742 families, a 1971 survey showed that 8,161 families had incomes of under $800 and only 56 families, or half a percent, had incomes over $2,000.
It is probably best to adopt an unemotional approach to this problem. Overall policies aimed at evicting tenants whose incomes have risen well above the normal income criteria for admission to public housing might well bring a disturbing sense of insecurity to large numbers of tenants. My colleague the Honourable Director of Social Welfare has drawn my attention to the Chinese saying “安居樂業” which, I suppose, could be translated as "To live in Security and Contentment".
I do not think that any Members of this Council would wish tenants to be in any other frame of mind or, for that matter, would they wish to do anything that might discourage tenants from increasing their incomes for fear of being unhoused. To be fair on my friend Mr. CHEONG-LEEN: he was not advocating very harsh solutions to the problem of the better-off tenants in public housing. I am only dwelling on this issue because I believe that the advocates of drastic action overestimate the size of the problem and may well underestimate the adverse consequences of their own proposals for dealing with it.
Several Members raised such important matters as new admission criteria for public housing, sale of flats, assistance to commercial building developers and changes in rental policy.
These questions are all highly relevant at the present time but extremely complex. They should properly be examined in depth by the new Housing Authority. That Authority will be equipped with
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