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A series of housing schemes to help foster harmonious families in public rental housing (PRH) is now open for applications.
The schemes included enhancing housing arrangements on the addition policy, transfer scheme, amalgamation of tenancies for tenants as well as enhancing the existing priority schemes for application of PRH.
A spokesman for the Housing Authority (HA) said today (October 5) that the authority's Subsidised Housing Committee (SHC) approved the above schemes in May in support of a policy initiative announced by the Chief Executive in his 2006/07 Policy Address in helping to forge closer and harmonious relationship among family members in establishing a family-based support network.
"To facilitate the Government policy of 'Ageing in Place' for the elderly, the addition policy for PRH tenants is relaxed to include adult offspring (and their family members) of elderly tenants," the spokesman said.
Before the relaxation, adult children could only be granted conditional temporary stay to take care of needy elderly tenants.
"The whole household has to undergo the Comprehensive Means Test (CMT) pitched at the level of the Housing Subsidy Policy (HSP) and Domestic Property Test (DPT) according to the current policy on addition," he said.
"To promote the establishment of a family-based support network, the transfer scheme is also enhanced to allow the elderly and one of their young offspring PRH households originally residing in different District Council (DC) districts to live nearer to each other within the same DC district to facilitate mutual care of the two generations."
Up to 1,000 flats mainly in urban and extended urban districts have been set aside for the scheme for this fiscal year. Before the enhancement, only flats in the New Territories were available for transfer.
The spokesman pointed out that applications for transfer under the enhancement scheme this year should reach the Housing Department on or before November 9.
"The SHC also agreed to enhance the existing scheme on amalgamation of tenancies to facilitate younger PRH families to take care of their elderly parents or dependent relatives. The amalgamated household can go to any district and be offered new flats if they so choose, subject to the availability of resources. The younger household will be required to undertake to take care and live with the elderly but will not need to undergo the CMT and DPT."
Apart from the above three housing arrangements, the existing Families with Elderly Persons Priority Scheme (FEP) and Special Scheme for Families with Elderly Persons (NFEP) in the application for PRH are also enhanced.
"The minimum waiting time for both FEP and NFEP has been shortened from two years to 18 months, which is shorter than the average waiting time of general applicants for a flat in the urban or extended urban districts by at least seven months," the spokesman said.
"For NFEP, we have relaxed the restriction in the choice of district from only the New Territories to any districts except the urban," he said.
The Housing Department has prepared a set of new publicity material to promote the enhanced schemes. Seminars will also be held with social workers of non-government organisations to enhance their understanding of the enhanced schemes.
Ends/Friday, October 5, 2007
Issued at HKT 14:45
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