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The land and water committee used to have 3 to 4 meetings a year and discussed 7 to 8 subjects per meeting, and the noise committee used to have 4 to 5 meetings a year and discussed up to 10 subjects in one meeting. Now EPCOM will, at most, meet 6 times per year and discuss maybe 3 or 4 subjects per meeting. In other words, these committees were acting as a filter and at the same time as monitoring bodies. This is something the newly reconstituted EPCOM will not be able to do. It will, in fact, have to be done by the EPA, which means that all these problems will stay within the Civil Service, which also means that it will be much easier to sweep some of the problems under the carpet or keep them secret.
I feel very sorry for the unofficial members of the newly constituted EPCOM. It will take most of them at least a year to gain the sort of experience necessary to intelligently appraise the kind of wool which will be pulled over their eyes by the EPA and the Secretary of Health & Welfare, and, of course, in the end, they will be blamed for EPCOM's failures. I must say I was also very surprised that the Chairman of EPCOM accepted this reorganization without consulting his colleagues. If I had been in his shoes I would have resigned.
I noticed that one of the newly appointed members of EPCOM made the quite unnecessary remark that he was glad that all the special polluting interests represented previously had been removed. Among others, of course, he was referring to me and if he had been reading the papers or listening to the radio during the last few years he would have noticed that I was constantly being asked the question as to how I could possibly combine the job of chairing an air pollution committee with the job of selling motor cars, one of the prime air polluters, and my answer to this was always the same: I only realized there was such a thing as air pollution because I was selling motor cars and over the last fifteen years I have made absolutely certain that the cars I sell are the least polluting possible under the circumstances, which in some cases made the cars more expensive. If it hadn't been for people like myself the pollution in Hong Kong would be far worse than it is now, because we took mitigating measures without waiting for the necessary legislation, and of course I am on record in lots of Committee meeting minutes of pushing for better and faster legislation against air pollution which would automatically affect my own industry. The same can be said for the representatives of the oil and power companies. I will now watch with great interest whether the gentleman concerned who made the criticism will be able to be more effective in his membership of EPCOM than I was.
So far I have been entirely negative. I have shown how neglectful Government is of the environment and criticized their attitude. Now I want to say a few things about how I would tackle the problem if I were put in charge.
Pollution of all kinds is one of the most complicated problems civilization has to face and I want to make it quite clear here that pollution is not just man-made. There is a great deal, and in some instances considerably more, natural pollution than man-made pollution. Also, some man-made pollution is inevitable because without it we would not be able to raise our standard of living and I think the point must be made that in spite of everything we are doing to the environment we have been able to raise the standard of living, improve the quality of life and most important extend the life expectancy of ordinary people all over the world and this could not have been done without the industrial and transport infrastructure which cause a major part of our pollution. We also have to keep in mind, and this is most important in the context of Hong Kong, that pollution control must be cost effective. It would be absolutely fatal if we had clean air and clean water and 25% unemployment because we were no longer competitive.
I see as one of Government's major problems the structure of the present controls, or better, non-controls of environmental pollution. There is first of all the Secretary of Health & Welfare who quite apart from the environment, is responsible for a whole range of very serious problems connected with the medical services, hospitals, the social services, etc. However good this Secretary of Health & Welfare may be, by the very nature of things he will not be able to give the sort of attention to the environment it needs. Then reporting to the Health & Welfare Branch is the EPA. In my view quite wrongly, this is at present being built up and run by a Scientific Officer rather than a general administrator (it is interesting to note that I don't know a single EPA anywhere in the world run by a Scientist and I want to make it clear that this is not in any way a criticism of the present incumbent, it is a criticism of the principle involved), which in view of the Hong Kong Government's usual propensity for generalists is really rather surprising. The EPA so far is completely non-executive. It is concerned (and God knows I have been told this many times) with the overall picture, the legislation, the research, the monitoring, but not with what they like to call 'firefighting'. This firefighting and the actual enforcement of pollution regulations is split among many separate directorates. The Department of Agriculture and Fisheries is responsible for some of the land and water pollution in various parts of the Territory, the Marine Department is responsible for cleaning the Harbour, the Urban Council via the Urban Services Department is responsible for cleaning the Urban areas and the new Regional Council via the New Territories Services Department does the same thing in the rest of the Territory. The Labour Department is responsible for certain bits of air pollution, the Transport Department and the Police are responsible for enforcement of moving vehicles emission regulations. The Royal Observatory is responsible for certain parts of the monitoring etc. etc. The whole organization is unwieldy and has grown in this way because no-one sat down at the beginning and really decided that environmental pollution was important enough to warrant its own department. I hope somewhat forlornly that by now some in Government are beginning to understand that something really must be done.
If I were in charge the first thing I would do would be to create a quite separate branch for the Environment with a separate Secretary. Then I would create two separate departments: One, the present EPA but run by a first class
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inevitable because without it we would not be able to raise our standard of living and I think the point must be made that in spite of everything we are doing to the environment we have been able to raise the standard of living, improve the quality of life and most important extend the life expectancy of ordinary people all over the world and this could not have been done without the industrial and transport infrastructure which cause a major part of our pollution. We also have to keep in mind, and this is most important in the context of Hong Kong, that pollution control must be cost effective. It would be absolutely fatal if we had clean air and clean water and 25% unemployment because we were no longer competitive.
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