ENG-2015 — Page 245

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Planning, Land and Infrastructure

selected under the schemes and support owners served with statutory notices to promptly carry out the required inspection and repair.

During the year, the department served 589 repair orders on owners over defects; 947 dilapidated buildings were repaired.

The Operation Building Bright programme is administered by the government, the Hong Kong Housing Society and the Urban Renewal Authority to create more job opportunities for the building repair and maintenance industry and to improve building safety. It gives financial help and technical advice to owners of old and dilapidated buildings to carry out repair and maintenance works. The government and the two organisations allotted $3.5 billion to the programme when it was set up in 2009. Since then, the programme had helped repair and maintain about 3,100 buildings and created more than 60,000 job opportunities in the industry.

The Housing Society administers, on behalf of the government, a $1 billion Building Maintenance Grant Scheme for Elderly Owners. Recipients may use the subsidy under the scheme to repair their premises or to repay outstanding loans from the Buildings Department, the URA or the Housing Society that have been granted to keep their premises in proper condition. The scheme has received 24,196 applications since its inception in May 2008 and approved 18,566 of the applications, involving around $44.1 million.

Over the years, the Housing Society and the URA have also offered building owners. comprehensive financial support via their joint Mandatory Building Inspection Subsidy Scheme and Integrated Building Maintenance Assistance Scheme.

The Minor Works Control System, which provides building owners with simplified statutory procedures for carrying out small-scale works, continues to grow in popularity. In 2015, 115,832 minor works submissions were received, compared with 106,829 in 2014.

In 2015, the Buildings Department put in place various internal measures to enhance the effectiveness of its actions against unauthorised building works (UBWs). The department continued to step up enforcement against unauthorised signboards, including carrying out large-scale street operations. It took priority enforcement against new UBWS and those creating high risks of fire or to a building's structural safety, including UBWs associated with subdivided units. Removal of UBWs erected on the exterior of buildings, including rooftops, podiums and yards, continued. The department also strengthened enforcement action at New Territories village houses in line with the strategy implemented in 2012.

In 2015, the department attended to 41,048 reports on UBWs, served 12,918 statutory removal orders and removed 24,362 UBWs. A total of 3,030 offenders were prosecuted for failure to comply with the statutory removal orders and 3,006 cases were adjudicated, resulting in 2,426 convictions and fines totalling $15.49 million.

Lifts and Escalators

To enhance the safety of lifts and escalators, the government, in consultation with the Lift and Escalator Safety Advisory Committee, implemented a series of long-term improvement

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