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made the advances we should have in control of hawkers. But Sir, I say the ball rests completely at the feet of Mr. BERNACCHI, Mrs. ELLIOTT and Dr. Hu, who are in fact controlling hawker policy and whose job it is to formulate constrained and proper and humane policies which this Council can implement. I support the motion.

CHAIRMAN (in English):-Does any Member who has not spoken wish to do so now?

MR. BERNACCHI (in English):-Mr. Chairman, where have you on a point of procedure, got the right to dictate who is the last speaker except, of course, that the last speaker of all is the proposer of the motion?

CHAIRMAN (in English):-Mr. BERNACCHI, may I draw your atten- tion to what Mr. Hu said when he stood up to second the motion: that he reserved his speech under Standing Order 21, paragraph 10? And, indeed as the seconder of the motion, he has reserved his right to speak last but one, and so every other member should evidently speak ahead of him. Now, if you challenge the Chairman's interpreta- tion, you must do it by a substantive motion. (Laughter).

MR. BERNACCHI (in English):—Yes, I will just record the question rather than the challenge "where have you got the right".

CHAIRMAN (in English:)-This is in fact the proper procedure. If the seconder of a motion reserves his speech, he does so presumably for good reason, and he obviously expects that every other Member who is not sponsoring the motion should speak before he does. So, in all fairness, the Council must accord him that privilege in the same way that the Council accords to the mover of a motion the right of reply. May I then call upon Mr. F. K. Hu to speak.

MR. F. K. HU (in English):-Mr. Chairman, I am in favour of the motion which would have the effect of restoring the mandatory nature of the provisions on confiscation of hawker's equipment or commodities of unlicensed hawkers.

The point which I wish Members to bear in mind is that in the field of hawker management, we are already faced with a de facto situation of environmental deterioration. We are unfortunately unable to start with a clean slate. Therefore, any discussion on this subject must be tested against the basic yardstick: would it help the environ- ment?

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Based on the experience of enforcement staff of the Department we could not escape from the conclusion that we simply have to resort to mandatory confiscation. I am sure nobody likes mandatory confisca- tion, including myself, but the question is not so much whether one likes it or not, as whether one has to do it or not in order to protect the interest of the general public with which we are mainly concerned.

Before this Council introduced the policy of mandatory confisca- tion of hawker's equipment or commodities of unlicensed hawkers, when hawker raids were carried out, unlicensed hawkers made full use of the loopholes of the law to play a cat-and-mouse game with enforce- ment officers by either running away at the first sign of a raid, leaving their goods behind, or simply refusing to acknowledge that the goods belonged to them. As soon as enforcement officers had turned their backs, the same hawkers were likely to return and start operating again, committing the same offence. Without any power to seize the goods and their subsequent forfeiture, enforcement officers found that the exercise was a game in which the hawker enforcement staff was bound to lose. If was largely because of the futility of this game that this Council, some years ago, sought the introduction of the legal provision for the seizure of goods where a hawking offence appeared to have been committed. One would of course recall that the penalties pre- scribed under Hawker By-law 56 for hawking offences, including those invoking the forfeiture provision, are fines, with the exception of the offence of "hawking without a licence" for which a custodial sentence is also provided. We know of course that custodial sentences are rarely, if ever, imposed by the courts; at the same time, the fines imposed are very low. This has brought about a situation in which, before the introduction of mandatory forfeiture, hawkers had little regard for the law and indeed were said to budget for the likely amount of fines as part of their overheads which the profits they made were more than enough to cover. Also, because there are so many hawking cases before the courts, no official records of previous convictions are kept so that no evidence of previous convictions for hawking offences could be produced for magistrates. As a consequence, the magistrate is not in a position to impose a penalty graduated according to the number of previous convictions. From the unofficial records kept by the Depart- ment, some hawkers who are persistent offenders have literally dozens of previous convictions and clearly have little regard for the law, particularly for low fines. Much as we might regret it, mandatory confiscation puts teeth into our law enforcement.

Given the present strength of the Hawker Control Force which is large enough to operate only in certain parts of Hong Kong Island, and