MR CHAN KIN-POR (in Cantonese): Thank you, Deputy President. Now that the legislation on Article 23 of the Basic Law has been successfully completed, we can put aside our worries and strive to spur economic development and improve people’s livelihood. I believe the Legislative Council will be able to contribute many useful proposals to help the Government solve the deep-rooted problems in Hong Kong. I thank Mr CHAN Hok-fung for proposing today the motion on the sale of public rental housing (“PRH”) units. As a matter of fact, the Tenants Purchase Scheme (“TPS”) has made it possible for tenants to acquire their own homes and the Government to recover part of the costs, thus killing two birds with one stone. However, TPS has also caused many management and maintenance disputes due to its mixed tenure, which have plagued the residents. In considering the re-launch of TPS, the Government must explore options to enhance the scheme first.
There have been calls for the Government to re-launch the sale of PRH units. One of the main reasons is public finance. The scale of the PRH scheme in Hong Kong is enormous. As the supply of PRH continues to increase, so does the expenditure on housing construction, especially in view of the huge fiscal deficit of the Government now. According to the information of the Hong Kong Housing Authority (“HKHA”), its current cash balance is about $70 billion. Due to the need to meet the 10-year public housing supply target, it is estimated that the cash balance of HKHA will drop to about $40 billion by 2028. If the Government re-launches the sale of PRH units, HKHA will be able to recover part of the construction costs and reduce the management expenditures. This will save the need of the Government to inject funds to HKHA in the future and HKHA may even be able to have funds to plough back to the Treasury.
I agree that constructing more PRH units will increase the Government’s burden, and that is why the Government is considering re-launching TPS. However, in my opinion, the present fiscal deficit is cyclical in nature brought by restructuring of industries, which is only a short-term problem. Based on the Government’s projection, the fiscal deficit will gradually turn into surplus in the next three to five years. Therefore, public finance should only be one of the Government’s considerations, and the Government should not sell its public housing assets purely because of financial problems.
In addition, the Government needs to consider the selling price. On the one hand, the Government certainly needs to recover the costs at a reasonable price; on the other, it cannot set the price too high to make PRH flats unaffordable for the tenants. Besides, selling a large number of PRH flats will also reduce the number of recovered flats each year, so the Government also needs to consider the reducing supply of PRH flats.
Moreover, in exploring the re-launch of TPS, the Government must also optimize the scheme to plug the existing loopholes. TPS has given rise to a mixed tenure, meaning that rented flats and purchased flats co-exist in the same estate, with the former being managed under the Housing Department and the latter under the Owners’ Corporations (“OCs”). Due to the fact that PRH estates are large in scale with lots of common facilities, there are bound to be numerous maintenance and management problems. The co-existence of two different management systems is prone to disputes, which are difficult to be dealt even in estates where OCs have been established. In the past, due to inability to coordinate between the two systems, problems ranging from water leaks in flats to slope maintenance have ended up in disputes, causing much trouble to the residents. Hence, the Government must find ways to deal with the existing problems; otherwise, a well-intentioned policy may easily turn into an unfavourable one.
Thank you, Deputy President.