Following is the transcript of remarks by the Secretary for Transport and Housing, Mr Frank Chan Fan, on the Long Term Housing Strategy Annual Progress Report 2017 at a media session this afternoon (December 20):
 
Reporter: Mr Chan, in paragraph 28 of your report you mention that the so-called spade-ready sites are almost already used up. Given the fact that, as you said, the 10-year target of public housing is falling short at around 50,000 units, how exactly can you find the places and the land to actually build the public housing so as to cut short the waiting time for public housing?
 
Secretary for Transport and Housing: You have very correctly pointed out that we have basically used up the spade-ready land. Spade-ready means that the land is well prepared in terms of infrastructure, in terms of necessary supporting facilities, and therefore we are going to acquire more land in order to expedite the delivery of public rental housing or public housing. In the past years, we have also explored and have achieved by converting some of those pieces of land which were allocated for private property and transformed them into land for public housing, so there are quite a number of alternatives or options that we can go ahead for, but after all, as we all know, the provision of land is basically at a bottleneck in terms of housing supply. Therefore the Chief Executive has set up a task force to look into the various options for both middle to long-term alternatives to develop more land for local community and housing purposes. As I have just mentioned in my earlier remark, that particular task force is going to engage the public early next year and will submit to the government a final proposition as to how and what we are going to do by the end of next November.
   
(Please also refer to the Chinese portion of the transcript.)

Ends/Wednesday, December 20, 2017
Issued at HKT 19:20

NNNN