7
an important group of 75 year leases to private wharf-owners and dockyards to replace the leases due to expire in 9 or 10 years time.
To carry out this investigation,
Sir David Owen, a former Chairman of the Port of London Authority, went to Hong Kong last winter with an expert engineering assistant, Mr. Kennedy. Sir David Owen unfortunately fell ill and died at Chicago on his way home early this year, but his report had been completed and given to the Governor before he left the Colony. A copy is registered No.1 in this file.
His recommendations are summarised in pages +3 to 48 of the report. His principal conclusions
were:-
(i) The establishment of a "Hong Kong Harbour Trust" under an independent chairman and including three Government officials, three British non-officials concerned with the trade of the port to be nominated by the European Chamber of Commerce and one unofficial concerned with the trade of the port to be nominated by the Chinese Chamber of Commerce.
(ii) The policy of the Trust should be to see that adequate and proper facilities were available in the harbour for ships and their cargoes, but to allow approved private enterprises to provide the se facilities as far as possible and to let private enterprise do its own operating.
(iii) The Trust should be established in the first place for an experimental period of three years with the Government responsible for its financial working over this period: and if it were found to function satisfactorily, it should then be put on a permanent basis.
The Governor in No.7 now recommends the adoption of Sir D. Owen's proposal for a Port Trust on these lines except for certain minor modifications which are described in the despatch - and amongst those modifications is more particularly a recommendation that there should be no experimental period, but that the Trust should be established on a permanent basis from the start; the person selected to be Chairman of the Trust should, the Governor advises, spend such time as is necessary in the Colony preparing the ground and advising on the organisation and legislation for the Trust before he is actually appointed to be Chairman.
The Governor's recommendation is based on the advice of an over-whelming majority opinion in the Executive Council, where only two official members considered that the future management of the port should continue to be vested in the Harbour Master's Department.
In normal times (including war conditions not specially threatening Hong Kong) there would seem to have been no difficulty in going ahead with approval for these recommendations, subject possibly to consultation with the Admiralty, and even now it
seems
No comments yet.
Private notes are available after approval.