Resettlement_Department_Annual_Report_1956-1957 — Page 39

77. Permit fees were increased on the 1st April, 1956 as a result of which the annual revenue from this source has risen from $534,972 in 1955/56 to $1,026,287 in the current year. At the same time a new system of collecting permit fees by mobile units which visit each area at regular intervals was introduced. The annually recurrent expenditure on the administration and maintenance of the cottage areas is estimated at $1 million.

78. Although the basic principles governing the administra- tion of the cottage areas will be the same as those for the multi-storey estates and many of the problems will be similar there are several important differences. The problems which arise owing to the concentration of up to 60,000 persons in one area will not exist but there will be others peculiar to the cottage areas. One example is the problem of fire risk which is non- existent in the multi-storey estates but still present in the wooden hut sections of some of the cottage areas. Fire-fighting teams have therefore been established in such areas, partly drawn from the staff of the department but mainly from the settlers, who may be organized by a Kaifong Welfare Associa- tion, as at Chai Wan where a fire-fighting display was a quite spectacular item on the programme when this area was honour- ed by a visit from Lady Patricia Lennox-Boyd in March 1957. The need for such fire-fighting teams in some of the cottage areas was emphasized by a fire in the wooden hut section of the Homantin Cottage Area on the 12th September, 1956 when 52 huts were destroyed and 470 persons made homeless.

79. Then there are the complications which have arisen owing to the activities of private building contractors who between the end of 1950 and the autumn of 1954 were allowed to build cottages for sale to persons eligible for resettlement. These complications have taken up a lot of the time of the staff of the Resettlement Administration Office, Kowloon during the past three years and also of the members of a Sub-Committee of the Urban Council which was appointed in December 1955 to go into the problem and completed its report in March 1957. Action is now being taken in accordance with this Sub- Committee's recommendations.

80. Another important difference is the fact that whereas the sites for multi-storey estates are formed and developed by

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