below. The District Commissioner New Territories is responsible for squatter control in the New Territories outside Tsuen Wan, although he is assisted in this by Resettlement Officers, Assistant Resettlement Officers and Resettlement Assistants seconded from the Resettlement Department for squatter control duties in Yuen Long and Tai Po districts. A division of responsibilities exists with the Control and Enforcement Section in the Buildings Ordinance Office of the Public Works Depart- ment on the control of unlawful structures on the rooftops and kitchen rooftops of private buildings.
28. For squatter control purposes, the area of the department's responsibilitics is divided into four districts (Hong Kong Island, Kowloon, Kwun Tong and Tsuen Wan), each of which is under the charge of a Resettlement Officer and 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 Resettlement Assistants and their supporting staff of labourers and gangers. The Resettlement Assistant is required to know his patrol area intimately, no easy task when an area may contain from 1,500 to 2,000 structures and between 6,000 and 15,000 people, and may extend to 3,000 acres.
29. The function of the patrolling Resettlement Assistant is basically to see that his area 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, the last of which was in 1964, are specially marked and recorded. Tolerated structures, as the name implies, are allowed to remain undisturbed until they have to be demolished to make way for permanent development, the occupants then being resettled in an estate. When a Resettlement Assistant finds an entirely new building or an unauthorized extension to a tolerated structure, he tries to persuade the owner to demolish it. If the owner fails to do so (as happens more often than not), the building is demolished by the department and the con- fiscated building materials may subsequently be used to help squatters and victims of natural disasters in building huts in licensed arcas.
30. The remaining list of duties performed by the Squatter Control sub-division is a varied one. Resettlement Assistants are sometimes asked to settle disputes and complaints among squatters. They are required to stop interlopers from taking up residence in huts which have been screened for resettlement, and they assist in the procedure for clearing an area during a clearance operation. They assist in the registration of
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