HONG KONG HOUSING AUTHORITY FEAR.
PRESS RELEASE
新聞稿
Speech by the Secretary for Housing Mr. I.M. Lightbody
at the Lions Club of Kowloon
at the Peninsula Hotel on 15th November 1976
Mr. President and Members:
When I was invited to speak to you today my original reaction was to talk about housing problems in Hong Kong but
I finally decided instead to speak about the Housing Authority and how it is organised to discharge its various duties, and what these duties include. It is a strange fact that a statutory body which has such enormous responsibilities as the Housing Authority should manage to operate so unobtrusively that whenever public housing matters crop up, the press and everyone else refers to Government doing this, or Government doing that in the public housing area. The fact is that the Government decided in 1972 to set up this Housing Authority under Ordinance to take over the planning, construction and management of all public housing in Hong Kong, including all the old estates which were vested in the new Authority. I need hardly add that the Authority took up a lot of headaches in the process but there is one respect in which it is much better placed than any of its predecessor organisations to manage the public housing stock on a sensible basis. You will remember that before 1973 public housing fell into several distinct categories managed by different bodies, and in one case the managing body was totally separate from
planning and the construction body. Since 1973 public housing has for the first time been handled as a single, co-ordinated service and the great advantage of this is that the Authority can as a matter of policy make positive arrangements for a more flexible use of the whole range of its housing stock. I believe that one of the worst features of the old public housing arrangements was the
/immobility
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