XN000022-1996-10-03 — Page 2

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Governor's question-and-answer session in LegCo

Following is the Governor, the Rt Hon Christopher Patten's question-and- answer session in the Legislative Council today (Thursday):

Mr Cheung Hon-chung (in Chinese): Mr Governor, in the past policy addresses, you made quite a number of promises and they have to do with many social policies which are important. One of them has to do with the solution to the temporary housing area. You have promised that by 1996, the end of it, you will clear all the temporary housing areas and also about the Western Corridor Railway and other railway extensions and also other housing promises, but none of these promises have been fulfilled. I would like to know when you made these promises, have you studied in depth into the feasibility of fulfilling those or is it that you have not done your utmost in order to fulfil those promises? Or is it that they are simply ways for you to collect political gains so that you are only making blank promises to members of the public?

Governor: Let me tell the Honourable Member what I actually promised rather than what he says I promised. What I actually promised in 1993 is that we'd make at least one re-housing offer to all those who were then living in temporary housing areas by 1997. So far we've offered re-housing to 53,000 of those who are living in temporary housing areas. That's 85 per cent and I very much hope and expect that we will be able to make offers to all by the date that I mentioned.

In 1993, we also pledged to clear all the pre-1984 temporary housing areas by the end of 1996. Let me say a word more about that. When I visited some of the temporary housing areas, one of the points that was put to me fairly regularly and it would have been put to Honourable Members as well, was that we weren't clearing the older temporary housing areas we were clearing housing areas according to our development needs rather than according to the social needs and according to the real problems faced by tenants in some of those temporary housing areas. So that's why I made that pledge and now I think I'm right in saying that 10 out of the 14 temporary housing areas created before 1984, have already been cleared and the remaining four will be cleared by the year end. So we will have kept our pledge.

There will, unfortunately, be some requirement for temporary housing provision and the Honourable gentleman knows as well as I do that a principle reason for that is that we have about 55,000 immigrants coming in legally from China each year, many of them requiring housing. The last two temporary housing areas that I've been to, I've been struck by the number of tenants that I've spoken to who were recent immigrants from China.