Social_Welfare_Annual_Report_1966-1967 — Page 13

which regularly enrol staff members in in-service training courses) and undertakes when practicable special training assignments. Under the Section Heads there serve both professional staff and specialist employees. Secretarial, clerical, accounting, office, maintenance and domestic service staff complete the establishment, for which the Secre- tary of the department is largely responsible. A summary of the senior staff and of the establishment is given by schedules of responsibility and by categories at Appendices 3 and 4. The offices, institutions and units in which they work are separately charted in Appendix 5. As will be seen, they are scattered all over Hong Kong, Kowloon and the New Territories.

12. Total expenditure during the year on social welfare within the Department's purview was, in round figures, $17.6 million, of which subventions to 46 voluntary agencies accounted for nearly 7 millions, direct welfare work for nearly 3 millions, and salaries and administra- tive expenses for the remainder. Appendix 6 gives the figures in detail and compares expenditure with that in previous years and with the amount voted by the legislature for 1967-68.

CHAPTER II

COMMUNITY ORGANIZATION

13. The post-war growth of Hong Kong's population and economy makes a lack of social cohesion inevitable. Hong Kong is neither a settlement with a history of 125 years nor an outpost of the world's most ancient continuous and uniform culture but a heterogeneous amalgam of people, whose corporate memory cannot go back longer than twenty years without recourse to imagination. The population is now 3.785 million people; there were only 650,000 in 1945 and nearly half the present population are immigrants, or the children of immigrants, who came in during the fifties. Seventy per cent live in severely cramped housing conditions around the fringes of the harbour, and half of these were not born in Hong Kong. Between 1954 and 1966 the Government resettlement programme had rehoused more than nine hundred thousand citizens in densely compressed multi-storey 'new towns' and in a few resettlement cottage areas; and there are plans which, if realized will bring the resettlement population to about 1.6 million by 1971, when out of a projected estimated population of 4.2 million, 38.1 per cent will be living in resettlement estates. Families rehoused in this way

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