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HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL

There is one school called the Yu Tong Top Floor Primary School which had to turn down 32 applications because all the places were full. So it depends from one place to another. It is very difficult to say. There are many reasons.

MR. CHEONG-LEEN: - Could a copy of that list of statistics be supplied to me, Mr. Chairman?

(Mr. Raymond Y. K. KAN returned to the meeting at this point).

COMMISSIONER FOR RESETTLEMENT: - With pleasure.

MR. CHEONG-LEEN: - Thank you. Now could the Resettlement Department be good enough to supply me with an indication of the number of children below the age of 14 who are not in school and who may or may not be working?

COMMISSIONER FOR RESETTLEMENT: - I am sorry, Mr. Chairman, I won't be able to do it because it is a difficult task. Perhaps the Census may prove useful.

MRS. E. ELLIOTT: - Mr. Chairman, may I ask the Chairman of the Resettlement Management Select Committee if his list includes the Yuen Long School.

MR. HU: - The school which I mentioned is Yu Tong, not Yuen Long. The list includes Yuen Long, yes. There is one annexe school at Yuen Long. It has 5,320 places. The enrolment is only 3,241. Vacant places 2,079.

MRS. ELLIOTT: - Mr. Chairman, I asked that question because Yuen Long is not in the Urban area and I wanted to clarify that it is because of the distance of Yuen Long that there are a large number of places there. But it is not correct that there are two annexe schools at Yuen Long and both of them have many empty places?

MR. HU: - It did not mention how many schools. It only mentions 5,320 places in Yuen Long. Is that one school or two schools?

COMMISSIONER FOR RESETTLEMENT: - I am not able to give an answer straight away. I need notice.

MR. CHEONG-LEEN: - With regard to the first question, the first supplementary question which I asked, Mr. Chairman, could the Education Department be consulted. Perhaps they would be able to provide some additional light on the subject.

COMMISSIONER FOR RESETTLEMENT: - I am sorry, we always consult the Education Department but there is no guarantee that it will be the right answer.

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MR. BERNACCHI: - Could the Chairman of the Resettlement Management Select Committee or the Commissioner for Resettlement explain why with one in four of Hong Kong's population in resettlement estates, there are no Government primary schools within the estates.

COMMISSIONER FOR RESETTLEMENT: - I am not competent to answer that question. It is Government's policy on education generally.

MR. PETER C. K. CHAN: - Mr. Chairman, since the allocation of primary schools is by the Resettlement Management Committee on the recommendation of the Education Department, perhaps for future guidance, the Commissioner for Resettlement would be kind enough to invite a representative of the Education Department to attend Management Committee meetings to give us some indication as to why some of the schools have so many vacancies, so that there will be some guidance for future allocations of subsidized primary schools in resettlement estates for which the Council is the sole authority.

CHAIRMAN: - I am prepared to consider that outside the context of this meeting, Mr. CHAN.

(4) MRS. E. ELLIOTT asked the following question:-

A pedlar hawker licence costs $20 and most fixed pitches, $100 per annum. Does the difference in cost presuppose that a fixed pitch licensee will be allocated a fixed site? If so, does the Urban Services Department have the right to allocate pitches in a private street, while another Government Department insists that the property-owners in that street must repair the damage done by hawkers paying such licence fees to the Government through the Urban Services Department?

THE CHAIRMAN, URBAN COUNCIL, replied as follows:-

The difference in cost between a pedlar hawker licence and a fixed pitch licence does not pre-suppose that a fixed pitch licensee will be allocated a pitch.

This difference in cost emphasizes the difference in status in that a pedlar hawker should operate on an entirely itinerant basis and is therefore only capable of trading on a smaller scale than a fixed pitch hawker. When on-street fixed pitch sites are allocated, this gives the hawker no permanent entitlement to the site because he may be required by the Council to move to another site at any time and the policy is to move hawkers off streets into bazaars wherever possible.

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