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Mr Szeto Wah (in Chinese): Mr Governor, during your term whether it be public housing or private housing, the volume of construction lagged far behind indicators or targets and at the same time the prices of private flats have risen three times. In your opinion, concerning the increase of wealth of property developers, do you think you have made a contribution?
Governor: A contribution to the wealth of property developers, is the honourable gentleman saying?
President: Correct.
Governor: I'm not sure that's their view. We undertook to complete over 100 flats a day and we've been doing that but as I said yesterday, I think housing is an area which the community is going to have address imaginatively and perhaps radically in the next few years and I'm sure that the long term housing strategy review which should be completed very shortly and published will provide a very good basis for that debate and that discussion.
I don't want to go into the figures, though I can mention those if the honourable gentleman would like, but I think all of us know that there are two real problems. The first is that while we commit a very substantial amount of resources to our Housing Authority, which is superbly led and does an excellent job, while we commit all those resources we still have too many people living in bad housing conditions for too long and paying a higher proportion of their household income for bad accommodation in the private sector than is paid by sometimes better-off tenants living in the public sector. So the first problem we have is that we commit a lot of resources to public housing but we still haven't got the waiting list down much below six, six and a half years on the way to our aim of five years and five years we should all think is anyway too long.
Secondly, while we're committing all those resources to public housing and some resources to encouraging people to become home owners, we've also got a community which is better and better off but where it's still all too difficult for many people to become home owners.
So there does seem to me to be something of a mismatch which we've got to address. It's not going to be an easy problem to address and I'm sure that some property developers will have views on some of the argument and debate that comes out of the long term housing strategy review.
I would only add this, when we were faced two, three years back, by the explosion in property prices, and took measures to deal with it, we were strongly criticised for those measures but they did prove in the event to be pretty successful. We damped down the housing market, the inflation in the housing market without knocking the pins from under it. It was a difficult exercise to carry through but one which I think we managed pretty successfully.