323
English legi-da-
tion as to enm-
pensation, and
our courts, than the principle that, without compensation, a violation of the rights of private property will not be permitted even for the general good of the community. That the public should pay for what it so acquires is an economical axiom which your petitioners feel sure has but to be stated to be received. Your petitioners, who believe they express berein the general sense of the landowners of the colony, would be glad to assist the Government, so far as they are able, in any reasonable sanitary experiment wherein the right to compensation is recognised. It should be remembered that the present landowners invested their capital in this description of property with certain rights attached, in the faith that such rights would be preserved, which, if they are not, a disastrous failure of public confidence must ensue. It should also be remembered that there is this radical difference between insanitary houses in England and such as may be called insanitary here, namely that the former are for the most part ancient structures, older than any restrictive building legislation, and openly defying the first principles of health, while the latter were erected in conformity with the sanitary and building laws of the colony for the time being in force. A house in Hongkong which the Bill would make insanitary has not only been hitherto tolerated by the Government, but is the very creature of the law; and, if innovations in the law compel the owner in the public interest to rebuild or alter his house, he should be compensated for any loss thereby occasioned him. It should also be remembered that the proposed legislation is at best but tentative and temporary, and that doubtless the antiquated sanitary principles of twenty years ago bear much the same relation to the accepted doctrines of today as will these to those of twenty years hence.
6. Regarding the principles of compensation whereon municipal improve-
instance of the ments of the kind here contemplatel have been carried out in England, your
omission to pro-
rite it in similar petitioners beg to refer Your Excellency to the following Public General Acts:-
ess under the
BIL.
(a). The Lands Clauses Consolidation Act, 1845, opens with the recital that "it is expedient to comprise in one general Act sundry provisions usually introduced into Acts relative to the acquisition of lands required for undertakings of a public nature and to the compensation to be made for the same." This is the keynote of the Act, which is devoted to effectuating the principle that everyone injuronsly affected by any such undertaking shall receive full compensation.
(b). The Towns Improvement Clauses Act, 1847.
Section 21 provides that compensation shall be paid for any damage occasioned by the execution
of the powers of the Act.
(c). The Public Health Act, 1875.
Section 121 (as also The Infectious Diseases Act, 1890, section 6) provides for the destruction of infected clothes and, bedding, subject to compensation.
Section 155 empowers the of any owner injuriously affected.
The Bill contains in the byelaws for Disinfection in schedule B a similar power, but without the relieving provision of compensation, which should certainly be given in these cases, as also wherever damage is caused in the process of disinfecting houses under the byelaws for the Prevention of Disease in the said schedule. local authority to regulate the building line, subject to the compensation
Contrast Section 6 (19) of the Bill; compensation should certainly be paid to any owner of land already leased from the crown who is required to sacrifice part of his land by a change in the building line.
Section 308 propounds the principle of compensation in the following words:" where any person sustains any damage by reason of the exercise of any of the powers of this Act, in relation to any matter as to which he is not himself in default, full compensation shall be made to him."
This is precisely the position wherein your petitioners claim that the Bill should place owners in this colony. But the following, among many others, are instances wherein the Dill would, without any compensation whatever, inflict the most grievious injury upon owners, in cases where they have fully complied with the existing law.
Section 6 (54) of the Bill proposes to reduce the European reservation by an extensive tract. Many large and costly European residences have, in reliance on the existing law, been built within this tract, and the immediate effect of the approach of Chinese tenement houses would be to depreciate such property. If it is necessary thus to increase the Chinese building area, your petitiouers submit that it should only be done on terms of compensation to owners who are injuriously affected thereby,
Section 48 of the Bill Your petitioners agree with the Govern ment as to the necessity of preventing overcrowding in Chinese dwellings, but they suggest that the allowance of double the air space required by English Acts is excessive. The Chinese as a rule live much cut of doors, use little artificial light, and no fires except a few sticks at certain hours of the day in the kitchen. The byclaws made in England by the Local Government Board under The Public Health Art, 1875, require in sleeping rooms three hundred cubic feet for each inmate, and The Factory and Workshop Act, 1895, requires. ordinarily two hundred and fifty cubic feet. It is submitted that in Hongkong four hundred cubic feet as provided by The Public Health Ordinance, 1901, is ample, and that at any rate if the allowance 30 recently fixed by the local legislature is now to be increased this can only be justly done subject to compensation for any loss thereby occasioned in accomodation and rent.
Section 147 of the Bill forbids the crection of buildings more than forty feet deep without lateral windows. The effect of this is that owners of deeper sites already leased from the crown (e.g. Prapa Reclamation lots) must sacrifice either every third house in a row
or so much of the land as exceeds the forty feet. Putting aside all questions of the expediency of the prohibition, it is clear that these sacrifices should not be required without compensation.
Sections 148 and 149 of the Bill virtually forbid cubicles. Apart from the question of whether some form of cubicle is not practically necessary to the domestic life of the poorer Chinese, it is certain that their abolition would entail a loss of rent. The prohibition therefore, in the case of land already leased from the crown, should only be applied subject to compensation.
Section 170 of the Bill provides in effect, as decided in the recent case of Knight v. Moses (6th July 1902), that the owner of a row of houses, erected in 1900 according to the then existing law, of however little depth, facing on one side a private street twenty feet wide and on the other (the kitchen) side a public street thirty feet wide, must, for the purpose of light and ventilation, pull down part of each house so as to make a farther open space; although if the streets bad happened to be reversed, and the one on the kitchen side had been private, it would, even if only six feet wide, have sufficed.
It was also decided, despite the provision that a domestic building with two main frontages in different streets shall be regarded as two domestic buildings if the depth exceeds fifty feet," that such a building of less than this depth cannot have two frontages, but that one of
331
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.