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Hong Kong’s land supply task force is praiseworthy, but has the Lands Department done enough to identify housing sites?
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I congratulate Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor on the creation of the Task Force on Land Supply and would like to express my appreciation for the time and effort volunteered by the many professionals on the task force.
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I also believe that the efforts by groups such as the Liber Research Community (“Public ‘misled’ on land available for 84,000 flats”, March 16) are to be applauded.
However, we employ over 4,000 professional civil servants in the Lands Department and, while volunteers are putting in hard work to investigate available land resources, what have the Lands Department officials been doing for the last 21 years?
Landowners built illegal private garden in Hong Kong – and for 20 years the government did nothing
I am told that they have assembled a database of land use and ownership that spans the city but, to my knowledge, this has never been made public.
I am concerned that the independence and integrity of a once effective civil service have been eroded and replaced with a self-serving community of professional obfuscators.
John Dainton, Pok Fu Lam
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