HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
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the Council when someday people are proud of their possession of a UC Club Membership Card.
With these remarks, Mr. Chairman, I support the motion.
MR. LEUNG KAM-TAO (in Cantonese):--Mr. Chairman, this is probably the last time that I would speak in the annual conventional debate. I would like to take this opportunity to put forward a detailed proposal on solving the hawker problem for the reference of those colleagues who care about the problem. It is hoped that the proposal will help the Council to tackle the hawker problem.
To solve a problem, one should first define clearly the problem itself and make an accurate analysis of it before a solution can be found and implemented. The so-called hawker problem is not attributable to the hawkers themselves. In the mid-80s, a working group of the Council pointed out clearly that the existence of hawkers had its social value after going through a thorough study. Therefore, I believe that the so-called hawker problem is actually the deterioration of environmental health and traffic condition in areas where hawkers operate in a disorderly manner or in unsuitable places. To solve the hawker problem, we should properly resite the hawkers required by a district to suitable places as well as prevent other hawkers from gathering to trade in unsuitable places which would pose environmental health problems to residents or affect the traffic. As such, we need to achieve the 4 objectives below:
Firstly, we should identify the number of dry goods or wet goods hawkers required by each district; secondly, we should look for enough market stalls and on-street pitches to resite these hawkers so that they can trade therein; thirdly, these hawkers who have been resited should be encouraged to stay in their pitches or stalls lest they may go back to the streets and become illegal hawkers again; fourthly, we should ban all other illegal hawkers from gathering to trade on the streets.
To fulfil the above objectives, I think the Council should observe the following procedures. First, we should improve the management and business environment of the existing fixed pitches both in markets and in streets so that the hawkers will feel satisfied and will not return to the streets as illegal hawkers. That means the yellow line scheme should first be strictly implemented in order to avoid obstruction of the passageways in the markets. We should then improve the ventilation and lighting to the extent that the business and shopping environments of the markets would be acceptable to the public. Besides, illegal hawking around the market area and illegal extension of business area to the pavement by shops should be strictly banned so that market stall operators and pitch hawkers on the streets would be protected against unfair or unreasonable competitions. Moreover, conversion of market stalls to places for storage and wholesale purposes should be prohibited. The area of small market stalls should be expanded by merging them with
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