XN000022-1995-10-13 — Page 14

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I would like to be able to get rid of all of them. The reason why we can't do so is we still need some emergency accommodation to deal, for example, with new immigrants coming in from China and we're now in a situation where there are about 50,000 coming in every year. We need to be able to deal with those who are being cleared from squatter developments, we need them for those sort of emergencies. What we're determined to do is to try to ensure that the standard of provision in those temporary housing areas which we'll still need, and we'll still need because the alternative is people sleeping on the streets or people jumping some of the 150,000 in the existing waiting list. What we're determined to do is to improve the actual standards in those temporary housing areas. First of all by introducing a new sort of housing unit, a new sort of prefabricated unit and secondly by moving some of those who will have to be in temporary housing areas, into older housing blocks which we'll do a bit of refurbishment to, which should be better than the conditions in the temporary housing areas.

I do find that going to them, as I said to you, unofficially and informally, enables me to see things as they are day to day, rather than as they are when Governors go and look at them. I can remember a couple that I went to a few months It's ago where the lavatories were blocked and were in a very bad condition. conceivable that if people had known I'd been going they would have sorted the problem out before I actually got there. As it was, I saw what the conditions were like and got somebody to do something about them. It's not the only place in the world where when Governor or Prime Minister or others visit a place, people try to clean it up a bit beforehand, but that's an argument for me going unofficially as well as officially.

Question (in Chinese): Mr Patten I would like to raise three questions very quickly. First of all, corruption. The community at large, I don't know if the community at large is clear about the ICAC and how it handles Civil Service corruption. I found that if there are very major cases then it's all over the streets. But what about small cases, minor cases of corruption? Would the ICAC let the civil service individual departments handle these small corruption's? I think I've heard of one case which was done that way. That department would actually issue a warning in letter that they should not go on being corrupt but after three years that person in question was actually promoted. If he commits a corruption offence again, do we have to tolerate this? I do hope ICAC could give us some data on how many cases are given back to the civil service to deal with, those cases which are not dealt with by the courts. That's the first question.