ENG-1959 — Page 18

REVIEW

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Island, with a storage capacity of 5,400 million gallons. This project is progressing steadily, but it will cost approximately $220 million and take 4-5 years to complete: and it is already clear that, by that time, still further supplies of water will be needed. This past year, therefore, also saw the beginning of a further investigation into the possibilities of damming the en- trances to a considerable bay in the New Territories, Plover Cove, some 43 square miles in extent and capable of holding some 29,000 million gallons of water when converted to a fresh water reservoir. A rough preliminary estimate puts the cost of this ambitious scheme at $348 million and the-time required for its completion at some 10 years. Additionally, or as a possible alter- native to the Plover Cove scheme, inquiries also started during the year into the practicability of using atomic power to produce fresh water from sea water, coupled with the generation of electric power. Enough has perhaps been said to indicate the effort which is being expended on the solution of this one problem of water supply alone, and to show that forward planning does not lag behind the increases in population expected; although the supply of water will undoubtedly remain a difficult problem in the years ahead.

The need for more housing has been second only in impor- tance to the supply of water. Here two main periods can be dis- tinguished; the period prior to the Shek Kip Mei fire when the provision of housing was largely left to private enterprise, and the period from 1954 onwards when Government first assumed responsibility for assisting the efforts of private enterprise by the provision of publicly-owned housing. The full story of the battle for adequate housing cannot be told here, and it is possibly only to touch on the broad outline. The part played by private enter- prise in providing housing must first be emphasized. Expenditure on all private building work has risen from about $100 million a year in the years 1950 to 1952 to the level of about $250 million in 1958-9: that is, expenditure is running at the rate of about $5 million a week, of which, on the average, approximately 60% represents the building of domestic premises. The scale of this effort can be appreciated from the sharp rise in the amount of revenue collected in rates over the period since the war; the figure for 1946-7 was just under $7 million, while the figure for 1958-9