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HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
the statistics and research staff to assess how appropriate these ideas are in meeting Hong Kong's public housing requirements.
Mr. Kenneth Lo put his finger on a very real problem when he spoke of the single person who is eligible for public housing but who cannot live with friends or relatives.
So long as whole families who are in need remain unhoused, it is difficult to justify allocating a unit that will take a whole family to a single individual. Sub-division of units has been tried but it has not been satisfactory.
However, at Yau Tong Estate, the Salvation Army is about to operate a hostel for single persons and another hostel run by the Resettlement Department will shortly be opened at the Tsz Wan Shan Estate.
If these hostels are successful, the number of them will be increased. Yet I do not share Mr. Lo's optimistic view that they will not require much supervision.
In normal circumstances, Sir, that is all I would have to say today. But as this is the last annual conventional debate, I sense that it is an occasion for famous last words.
The last Commissioner for Resettlement (which, with luck, may even be me) should at the last annual conventional debate pay two tributes. He should pay one tribute to the Members of this Council and he should pay another to the staff of the Resettlement Department.
To the Members of the Council, both present and past, I must say with all sincerity that I think the community and the Government owes you an enormous debt of gratitude for your collective contribution to public housing over the last twenty years.
Long before Chairman Harold Giles Richards welcomed the first Commissioner for Resettlement Mr. David Ronald HOLMES to the Council on 11th May 1954, a Member still on this Council, but not present at the moment, I am afraid, had already devoted much of his own time to the housing problems of the poor in Hong Kong.
That same Member asked his first supplementary question on resettlement in September 1954--the first of many.
If one could reckon up the value of the time devoted by this one Member to public housing problems and add to it the time spent by the other Members whose names appear month after month in the records of the Council over the 18 years of the Resettlement Department's existence, the sum would be prodigious. It would probably pay for a whole museum.
HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
311
However, it is not for me, a newcomer to this Council, to evaluate the success of the Council's effort in the resettlement estates.
In the more critical atmosphere of the 70s people frown at the conditions in our older resettlement estates. Yet it would be wrong of them to hold either the Council or the Resettlement Department wholly accountable.
The truth is that the basic housing situation with which the Council and the Department were expected to deal was so unsatisfactory from the outset that good management, in the Housing Authority sense of the word, was an impossibility.
In those early days Government housed people to clear land. Now, mercifully, it will clear land to house people. The distinction, Ladies and Gentlemen, is fundamental in understanding why the conditions and quality of public housing in Hong Kong vary so much.
And now for my tribute to the staff of the Resettlement Department. Speaking from over 20 years' experience in a variety of Government departments I can say with complete conviction that the work carried out by my staff is probably the most difficult and unpleasant to be found in the whole of the Government Service.
Whether they work in the Estates Division, in the Squatter Control Section or in the Squatter Clearance Section, they are in daily conflict with people.
Such people are not criminals and to act against them gives an officer little sense of satisfaction. They are in the main law-abiding humble people with an accommodation problem of one kind or another. They feel righteously indignant when they are refused an extra room to relieve their overcrowding, or when their squatter home or their hawker structure is demolished. The reasons, however justifiable in policy, are not often meaningful to them.
Conflict in these circumstances is an entirely unpleasant experience and my officers face up to it more from a sense of duty to the Council and the department than from conviction. Their sympathies are often with the man with the problem.
In an average year, my staff will demolish about 12,000 illegal structures and clear 25,000 people from their homes to free the land for development. They are in at every fire, flood, typhoon, landslide or collapsed building to register and screen homeless victims and to distinguish between the impostors and the genuine cases.
It is a life of unremitting friction and in this way quite unlike any other kind of work. If anyone is at all in doubt about this, he
Page 166 of 206
Page 166 of 206
310
HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
the statistics and research staff to assess how appropriate these ideas are in meeting Hong Kong's public housing requirements.
Mr. Kenneth Lo put his finger on a very real problem when he spoke of the single person who is eligible for public housing but who cannot live with friends or relatives.
So long as whole families who are in need remain unhoused, it is difficult to justify allocating a unit that will take a whole family to a single individual. Sub-division of units has been tried but it has not been satisfactory.
However, at Yau Tong Estate, the Salvation Army is about to operate a hostel for single persons and another hostel run by the Resettlement Department will shortly be opened at the Tsz Wan Shan Estate.
If these hostels are successful, the number of them will be in- creased. Yet I do not share Mr. Lo's optimistic view that they will not require much supervision.
In normal circumstances, Sir, that is all I would have to say today. But as this is the last annual conventional debate, I sense that it is an occasion for famous last words.
The last Commissioner for Resettlement (which, with luck, may even be me) should at the last annual conventional debate pay two tributes. He should pay one tribute to the Members of this Council and he should pay another to the staff of the Resettlement Department.
To the Members of the Council, both present and past, I must say with all sincerity that I think the community and the Government owes you an enormous debt of gratitude for your collective contribution to public housing over the last twenty years.
Long before Chairman Harold Giles Richards welcomed the first Commissioner for Resettlement Mr. David Ronald HOLMES to the Council on 11th May 1954, a Member still on this Council, but not present at the moment, I am afraid, had already devoted much of his own time to the housing problems of the poor in Hong Kong.
That same Members asked his first supplementary question on resettlement in September 1954--the first of many.
If one could reckon up the value of the time devoted by this one Member to public housing problems and add to it the time spent by the other Members whose names appear month after month in the records of the Council over the 18 years of the Resettlement Depart- ment's existence, the sum would be prodigious. It would probably pay for a whole museum.
HONG KONG URBAN COUNCIL
311
However, it is not for me, a newcomer to this Council, to evaluate the success of the Council's effort in the resettlement estates.
In the more critical atmosphere of the 70s people frown at the conditions in our older resettlement estates. Yet it would be wrong of them to hold either the Council or the Resettlement Department wholly accountable.
The truth is that the basic housing situation with which the Council and the Department were expected to deal was so unsatisfactory from the outset that good management, in the Housing Authority sense of the word, was an impossibility.
In those early days Government housed people to clear land. Now, mercifully, it will clear land to house people. The distinction Ladies and Gentlemen is fundamental in understanding why the condi- tions and quality of public housing in Hong Kong vary so much.
And now for my tribute to the staff of the Resettlement Depart- ment. Speaking from over 20 years' experience in a variety of Govern- ment departments I can say with complete conviction that the work carried out by my staff is probably the most difficult and unpleasant to be found in the whole of the Government Service.
Whether they work in the Estates Division, in the Squatter Control Section or in the Squatter Clearance Section, they are in daily conflict with people.
Such people are not criminals and to act against them gives an officer little sense of satisfaction. They are in the main law-abiding humble people with an accommodation problem of one kind or another. They feel righteously indignant when they are refused an extra room to relieve their overcrowding, or when their squatter home or their hawker structure is demolished. The reasons however justifi- able in policy are not often meaningful to them.
Conflict in these circumstances is an entirely unpleasant experience and my officers face up to it more from a sense of duty to the Council and the department than from conviction. Their sympathies are often with the man with the problem.
In an average year, my staff will demolish about 12,000 illegal structures and clear 25,000 people from their homes to free the land for development. They are in at every fire, flood, typhoon, landslide or collapsed building to register and screen homeless victims and to distinguish between the impostors and the genuine cases.
It is a life of unremitting friction and in this way quite unlike any other kind of work. If anyone is at all in doubt about this, he
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