ENG-1994 — Page 29

HONG KONG: A HARD-EARNED SUCCESS

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intimately

and at times frustratingly

involved in the Airport Core Programme, first as Secretary for the Treasury and then as Financial Secretary.

Housing in the Early Days

We were immensely proud of the resettlement programme of the late 1960s: the 1966 report described it as "the world's foremost resettlement programme". Hong Kong was not rich in those days, but the programme attracted worldwide attention because of the speed with which the homes were being built, the scale of the project and the problems it was designed to solve. The 1967 report recorded that the resettlement building programme had reached a remarkable milestone when its millionth tenant was housed, only some 13 years after the building programme began.

And for those who think we have only recently been converted to providing adequate social services, it is worth recording that the rent for a family in the older blocks was about $18 a month, or roughly 4.5 per cent of the average family income. Even in those early days, it was an automatic response to provide schools, clinics, community centres and other welfare facilities, admittedly at a fairly basic level. Many of us can remember the cheerful clamour from the open, fenced-off playgrounds of the rooftop schools which were common then, space being desperately short. Crowded and basic as these early housing and school facilities were, they afforded many of our population a good start in life; given the social mobility in Hong Kong, then and now, many of our successful citizens began in this relatively humble way.

It is also worth remembering why it was called the 'resettlement' programme. This wasn't any ordinary housing improvement project. Hong Kong had to absorb nearly a million refugees after the end of the war. They brought problems as well as opportunities. One of the main problems was the great number of squatters, a problem described graphically in the 1953 Hong Kong Annual Report:

"There is another feature of the landscape which our observer could see with great ease and, if he were a kindly man, with great regret. The slopes rising from certain, predominantly industrial, parts of the urban area are covered with flimsy, disreputable shacks so tightly packed that they seem to elbow each other off the precarious cliffs to which they cling. They are the homes of some 250 000 people, possibly one-eighth of the Colony's whole population. This is Hong Kong's greatest social problem. Its origin lies not in Hong Kong's callousness or indifference to the welfare of its people, but in its humanity and in its long and proud tradition as a free port to the world and a place of refuge for any Chinese who cared to step across the border."

The problem became urgent in early 1954, after a series of disastrous fires in squatter areas left 53 000 people homeless, and the resettlement (of squatters) programme resulted.

I remember in my first year in Hong Kong going out with a young professional rating and valuation officer to assess the rents for the shops and restaurants which operated on the ground floors of the resettlement blocks. In one respect, these facilities were an exception to our normal philosophy that market forces should prevail, for the numbers (and size) of shops had more to do with the quantity of shop-owners to be cleared and resettled than supply and demand- which duly led to all sorts of problems later. But in other ways, this was a good example of the Hong Kong way of doing things. The system was delightfully simple. There were only four rent levels: A, B, C and D. The rules were easily understood. It was also