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Transcript of remarks by STH after ninth meeting of Long Term Housing Strategy Steering Committee
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     Following is the transcript of remarks by the Secretary for Transport and Housing, Professor Anthony Cheung Bing-leung, at a media session after the ninth meeting of the Long Term Housing Strategy Steering Committee this afternoon (June 22):

Secretary for Transport and Housing: I will be very brief in my English introduction. Well, today we had the ninth meeting of the Long Term Housing Strategy Steering Committee. We spent seven hours excluding the lunch time on our discussion. Basically we have run through the outline for the future Long Term Housing Strategy consultation document. We aim to issue the document for public consultation in September. So we have the next couple of months to finalise the document.

     In the future document, we would like to touch on a number of issues. First of all we have to set an overview of the current housing situation and what we feel to be the housing problem. And we'll also lay down the vision for the Long Term Housing Strategy during the next 10 years. We have the objective of providing suitable housing for those in need of housing. At this stage, members of the Committee would favour giving more emphasis to public housing in terms of new provision. By public housing we mean both public rental housing and home ownership housing schemes. But still given the limited public housing resources, we have to make sure that distribution is equitable and we have also to make sure that we optimise the use of public housing resources. Two days ago at the last meeting, we have discussed and decided on the overall housing demand estimation for the next 10 years. The figure set for overall housing supply target is 447 000 (units). So today we affirm this figure and we also look at a number of sectors or groups with housing needs. Overall we feel that we will give slightly more priority to families verse single persons. But in terms of age, we feel that we need to give more priority to the elderly. And we also feel that we need to give priority to those households living in inadequate housing units including sub-divided units. But overall speaking, we have to be more specific about priorities because we are still limited by land, by housing resources.

     We will have a chapter on optimisation of the existing housing stock in particular public housing stock. We will have a chapter on the role of several delivery agencies including the Housing Authority, the Housing Society, the Urban Renewal Authority. We will also talk about the role of private sector because private housing remains to be an important component of the housing stock and the future housing provision. So in that context we would look at how the process of land supply could be streamlined. And there will be a chapter on the increase in the supply of housing land because land is so important to housing. We would like the community to come to a consensus that indeed we need to have more land and we need to give utmost priority to housing land. We know that housing is not just about having a site, having the necessary infrastructure support, community facilities, environmental quality, all these factors are important. But at the end of the day, we might need to strike the right balance. We might need to have some kind of social trade-off. So these big questions, choices will be presented for public discussion.

     And finally the last chapter of the document will talk about how we look at the future beyond the 10 years because whatever we are deciding today, whatever proposal we are setting out today will affect the housing policy direction into the future. So we would like also to think about the needs of future generation. Young kids today, 20 years later, 30 years later, they will be having housing needs. So if we get the current direction right, then we are indeed giving more hope to the next generation.

(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)

Ends/Saturday, June 22, 2013
Issued at HKT 23:00

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