Resettlement_Department_Annual_Report_1965-1966 — Page 18

is divided into two sections with an assistant resettlement officer in charge of each. Sections are sub-divided into patrol areas which are the responsibility of area officers and their supporting staff. The area officer is required to know his patrol arca intimately, no easy task when each area contains from 1,500 to 2,000 structures and between 6,000 and 15,000 people, and covers anythings up to 3,000 acres of hilly ground.

28. The function of the patrolling area officer is basically to see that his arca remains 'frozen', that is that no unauthorized new building takes place. Structures which are presumed to have been erected before August 1954 or which have since been expressly 'tolerated' following subsequent surveys are specially marked and records are kept of them. When the area officer finds an entirely new building or an unauthorized extension to a tolerated structure, he tries to persuade the owner to demolish it himself. If the owner fails to do this, the building is demolished by the department and the confiscated building materials are subsequently used to help squatters and victims of natural disasters in building huts in resite areas.

29. During the year 17,801 new structures and extensions were demolished by squatter control staff, an increase of 2,951 on the previous year. Of these 1,081 were on the roofs of permanent buildings. Three hundred and four tons of materials, mostly loose wood and tin sheeting, were confiscated. By the end of the year under review, there were over 470,000 people still living in tolerated squatter huts and 87,000 in the resite areas.

30. Resiting of squatters is one of the more positive duties of the sub-division; it resited 20,941 people during the year. These comprised 1,494 victims of disasters, 2,398 rooftops squatters from demolished tenements, 2,437 ex-tenants of condemned buildings, 528 squatters cleared to form firelanes in squatter areas, 99 compassionate cases, 540 homeless persons remaining on cleared sites after resettlement operations and 13,445 persons of other categories, mainly new illegal squatters from demolished huts and boats. This is only 40% of the total resited last year. The position eased largely because of the introduction of the Rent Advance Scheme for dispossessed tenants of condemned buildings and the sharp decrease in the number of people evicted from old buildings to make way for private tenement redevelopment.

31. As mentioned briefly in Chapter 2, the amendment of the Resettlement Ordinance in 1965 provided a legal framework for the

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