Lee ‘to stress government restructuring’ when he unveils policy platform
The housing crisis is the issue that has bedevilled previous chief executives, and as the sole candidate for election, John Lee has pledged to resolve it
Sole chief executive candidate John Lee Ka-chiu will stress that restructuring the government forms a key part of his vision for results-oriented leadership when he unveils his long-awaited election platform tomorrow, the Post has learned.
Other top priorities for Lee would include elderly care, technology, youth development and civil service reform, but he was unlikely to definitively state that he would revive a decade-old plan to strengthen the city’s No 2 and 3 positions with deputies, sources said yesterday.
“We need to study carefully if the deputy financial secretary would take away too many tasks from the portfolio of the chief secretary and his prospective deputies,” a campaign office insider said. “But it doesn’t mean the two posts will not be set up after Lee assumes the post of chief executive in July or delivers his maiden policy address in October.”
One campaign insider revealed Lee would only provide an overall policy direction and would not go into detail when he reads out his manifesto during an event at the Hong Kong Exhibition and Convention Centre. The speech, which will begin at about 11am and is expected to take 30 minutes, will be broadcast live on television and streamed through his Facebook channel.
Lee, the sole candidate with Beijing’s backing, was confirmed by election authorities on April 18 as the only hopeful to have received the required number of nominations to enter the election.
A preliminary check with sources on the content of his manifesto suggests the city’s former No 2 official will aim to tackle the city’s housing and land woes based on his “new ideology” of a “result-oriented” approach.
According to the insider, Lee will not set hard targets tomorrow, such as building a certain number of flats each year or reducing the average waiting time for applicants for public housing. He will only propose allowing eligible tenants to move into new public blocks earlier while other structures at the same estate are still under construction.
Another member of the campaign office said their functions and the division of labour between the Chief Secretary’s Office and Financial Secretary’s Office needed to be decided before any public announcement could be made.
The idea of adding two new deputies, first floated by former chief executive Leung Chun-ying in 2012, was revived earlier this year by incumbent leader Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor, whose plan to restructure government departments and bureaus had been positively received by Lee and his campaign team, the insider said.
Lee’s platform will also highlight the need for the next administration to step up policy research and take the pulse of society, but will not mention plans to reinstate the Central Policy Unit (CPU) at the heart of government.
The outfit, which dates to the colonial days in 1989, took a different focus and name under the current administration.
After taking office in 2017, Lam revamped the CPU to focus on positioning Hong Kong as an innovation hub and renamed it the Policy Innovation and Coordination Office.
It doesn’t mean the two posts will not be set up after Lee assumes the post of chief executive in July or delivers his maiden policy address in October
CAMPAIGN OFFICE INSIDER
It was not coincidental during a debut community visit on Sunday that Hong Kong chief executive candidate John Lee Ka-chiu chose to greet residents from two low-income families on a waiting list for public housing.
Like former chief executive Leung Chun-ying and incumbent leader Carrie Lam Cheng Yuetngor, Lee has identified housing as “the top priority among all priorities” in his bid for the city’s top job as the sole candidate approved by Beijing.
Hong Kong’s housing crisis has been long in the making and lethargic in its resolution. As part of the continuing chronic shortage of affordable housing, more than 220,000 residents are also currently stuck in cage homes and subdivided flats, while families face an average wait of six years for public housing as of February, a 23-year high.
While there have been many theories, the hard truth is that the city faces a dire shortage of land even as property developers are sitting on land banks, controlling supply and therefore heavily influencing prices. The government meanwhile, being highly dependent on land revenue as a major source of income, is saying its stocks are limited and it is not prepared to sell land cheaply.
Just how to resolve these conflicting agendas will now be Lee’s problem. Given that Beijing has also repeatedly said housing was a deep-rooted issue and the source of public unhappiness, analysts and lawmakers alike are watching keenly how Lee intends to untie this Gordian knot – finding enough land and speeding up the building of new homes.
Lee’s first chance to deliver will come tomorrow, as he plans to unveil his election platform focusing on housing, care for the elderly, technology, youth development and civil service reform, among other topics.
A preliminary check with sources on his manifesto suggests the city’s former No 2 official will aim to address housing and land issues based on his “new ideology” of a results-oriented approach. But sources said he would aim to build mostly on existing projects amalgamated from the playbooks of previous chief executives, rather than propose groundbreaking ideas.
Sources said a special task force would be set up in the new government overseeing interdepartmental coordination to expedite the acquisition of land and to compress building programmes to boost supply in the short term. Such an approach would echo Lam’s plan outlined in her last policy address.
“John Lee will highlight the importance of simplifying the planning process for providing land for building residential flats in an attempt to ease the housing crunch,” a core campaign team member said.
Beijing heavyweight Tam Yiuchung, Lee’s campaign office director, told the Post that, unlike his predecessors, Lee would only provide an overall policy direction, concept and vision in his platform, and would not go into great detail. The actual plans would be in his maiden policy address, Tam said.
Lawmakers and developers reckoned the short-term measures on streamlining of procedures were about offering “a solution when there are not many other solutions”, adding that it was too early to say whether the specific initiatives would be better than those offered by Lee’s predecessors.
But unlike previous leaders, Lee will not set hard targets such as building a certain number of residential flats each year or reducing the average waiting time for applicants for public rental flats. He will only propose to allow eligible tenants to move into new public blocks earlier while other structures at the same estate are still under construction.
“This may allow residents to live in better conditions, instead of subdivided flats, months or even a year earlier, based on preliminary assessment,” a source added. Currently, construction of a public-housing project takes three to four years to complete, but if infrastructure such as roads is not available, the process will take a few more years.
Lee on Sunday said he hoped to “achieve results” instead of “solely chanting slogans”. The former chief secretary said he understood housing was the key to solving many other issues in the city, including alleviating poverty and ensuring better resource allocation.
Insiders added that Lee would also push ahead with the Northern Metropolis plan and the Lantau Tomorrow project – a controversial scheme to build artificial islands in waters off Lantau Island for homes and a business hub – as suggested by Lam and Leung, with a proposed deputy financial secretary tasked to coordinate these mega projects.
The metropolis plan aims to turn parts of rural areas near the border with Shenzhen into an economic and residential hub housing 2.5 million people, while turning the San Tin area into a “technopole” or hi-tech cluster spanning more than 1,100 hectares.
Beijing has long singled out housing as a “deep-seated social issue” plaguing Hong Kong. In 2019, state media even said the difficulty young people faced in affording homes and the lack of social mobility were a “root cause” of the anti-government protests.
An even more direct indication of the central government’s impatience came last year when Xia Baolong, director of the Hong Kong and Macau Affairs Office under the State Council, urged the city to “bid farewell” to substandard subdivided flats and cage homes by 2049.
Lee’s performance on the housing front will therefore come under the microscope. The pressure will be considerable, given how all his predecessors since the 1997 handover have not been very successful in addressing the issue.
The latest average waiting period for public housing is now double the three-year pledge met by the previous governments between 2003 and 2014. At six years, it is the longest reported wait time since 1999, with nearly a quarter million on the list.
The city’s properties remain the least affordable of major cities, with the housing price-to-income ratio rising to 19.8 in the last quarter of 2021 from 16.6 in mid-2017, according to a report by the Hong Kong Monetary Authority, which means a household has to save all of its annual income for 19.8 years to buy a standard flat.
Insiders said Lee would very likely continue with major land and housing policies initiated by Lam given there were limited options, but he would shepherd a radical shift in management style to enhance workflow among civil servants and shorten procedures.
He also would give up controversial initiatives such as Leung’s country park ideas, sources said. Nor would he opt for building temporary housing, an initiative championed by Lam to ease the shortage in the short run.
Lawmaker Tse Wai-chuen, also a delegate to the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, the nation’s top advisory body, said previous governments had tried to address housing problems with “big projects” without tackling “internal restrictions”.
“Previous chief executives stressed to boost supply in the second five years, while they were not in tenure after the first five years, resulting in poor performance on housing issues,” he said.
Tse said reforming the overwrought procedures taken by departments when dealing with a project, especially from private developers, could be a big breakthrough, given how there were “not many other short-term solutions”.
The several major developers in Hong Kong, sitting on huge reserves of farmland in the New Territories, have a decisive hand in land ownership. They are almost always the default stakeholders in any plan by the government to build new towns.
Since being shamed by state media in 2019 for “hoarding land” and contributing to the social unrest, developers have become more responsive to the city government’s call to help tackle the land shortage issue. Some have supported a transitional housing scheme to build homes for lowincome groups. A few have shared their land to build public housing. But their participation is still seen as limited by many in the pro-Beijing bloc.
Some have urged the government to seize some of the developers’ land to build public housing, but Lam has said private property rights had to be respected under the Basic Law.
As the sole candidate approved for the May 8 poll, Lee has brought on board the city’s richest tycoons as his campaign advisers.
Whether they can be made to do more – by persuasion or diktat – will be a key challenge for Lee. In their virtual meetings with Lee earlier, two second-generation tycoons gave some clues they were willing to play ball. Martin Lee Ka-shing, the co-chairman of Henderson, expressed a willingness to “cooperate with the government in boosting housing supply”. Adam Kwok Kai-fai, executive director of Sun Hung Kai, suggested the government could push ahead with turning farmland into new towns.
Lau Siu-kai, vice-president of the semi-official Chinese Association of Hong Kong and Macau Studies think tank, said he expected Lee to initiate more aggressive policies for land acquisition or resumption, and possibly force developers to earn less when selling properties.
So far, Lee has not addressed the future relationship between his government and developers.
“Developers have no choice as they know well how the central government is treating giant enterprises and businesses in the mainland to avoid the monopolies of certain sectors. They do not want to be targeted,” he said.
“It is also their responsibility as they are part of Hong Kong, while Beijing had specified that housing woes were some deep-rooted problems that must be solved.”
Stewart Leung Chi-kin, executive committee chairman of the Real Estate Developers Association of Hong Kong, insisted to the Post that developers were always willing to work with the city’s leaders. He said he had submitted to Lee suggestions on behalf of the organisation, but stopped short of disclosing the details.
Commenting overall on land policies since 1997, Leung said governments had not been “thorough enough”, and the “complicated structure within the administration had worsened the problems”.
Since Lee announced his bid for the top job earlier this month, pro-establishment parties, lawmakers and developers have been sending in ideas to him, while his campaign office has also encouraged civil groups to grasp “the last chance” to submit written policy suggestions before he unveiled his platform.
Among the city’s think tanks backed by different political heavyweights, the one founded by the city’s first chief executive Tung Chee-hwa, Our Hong Kong Foundation, has been playing a key role in contributing ideas on housing initiatives for Lee’s platform, according to a politician close to his campaign office.
Foundation deputy executive director Stephen Wong Yuenshan, also a lawmaker, took leave and is assisting in his personal capacity as a chief writer of Lee’s housing policies, integrating proposals raised by different stakeholders.
Wong is also serving as one of the 16 deputy directors of the campaign office, while representatives of One Country Two Systems Research Institute, the think tank co-founded by former city leader Leung, are noticeably missing – a line-up the insider read as “a signal of Leung’s camp being sidelined”, a question Leung said he would not be drawn on.
Ryan Ip Man-ki, head of land and housing research at Our Hong Kong Foundation, agreed the top priorities of the next government should be expediting the sourcing of land and boosting supply in the coming five years.
Citing recommendations made by his think-tank in January, Ip highlighted the idea of bringing private developers back to the process of subsidised housing construction – a long-standing practice that was dropped in 2002.
“Developers are faster than the Housing Department as the latter usually involves more procedures in outsourcing to contractors. It’s good to enlist developers’ help as they are now more forthcoming in helping solve the housing problem,” he said.
On the campaign trail, Lee has been repeating his three areas of focus that he pledged when he announced his bid for the top post: shifting to a “result-oriented approach”, boosting Hong Kong’s competitiveness and reinforcing the city’s foundations, such as rule of law and its long-term stability.
Tik Chi-yuen, the city’s sole non-establishment lawmaker, said Lee had so far been guilty of precisely what he wanted to avoid, which was sloganeering, as the three areas were too unclear to function as a comprehensive plan on governance. Would the manifesto provide more details, he asked.
Brian Wong Shiu-hung, member of Liber Research Community, a civil group concerned with land policies, said judging from the measures revealed to the Post by sources so far, the platform “sounded rather loose”.
Wong was alarmed at the idea of further simplifying planning processes. “If you just impose the kind of ‘results’ you want, that is, building more flats without listening to the community, you won’t have a good result, in terms of pollution, traffic, forced clearance and so on,” Wong said.
He also said Lee should revisit the property vacancy tax, a plan Lam abandoned, to ensure more efficient use of housing.
A source close to Lee’s campaign team defended him, saying compared to Leung and Lam, he had limited time to prepare for the election campaign and platform, and “Lee does not want to make empty promises”.
“The public should give him more time,” the source urged, echoing campaign director Tam.
“Once he is elected, Lee will discuss the work goals with the new team. It is not appropriate to set too many targets at this time. We are sure he will be able to deliver in his first policy address.”
John Lee will highlight the importance of simplifying the planning process
A LEE CAMPAIGN INSIDER
Once he is elected, Lee will discuss the work goals with the new team
A LEE CAMPAIGN INSIDER