Ownership issues to be sorted out before government can reclaim sites, Eddie Ng says
JENNIFER NGOjennifer.ngo@scmp.com
PUBLISHED : Sunday, 22 November, 2015, 2:23am
UPDATED : Sunday, 22 November, 2015, 2:23am
Secretary for Education Eddie Ng Hak-kim
Four vacated schools stood empty because they were on private land, the education minister admitted after the government spending watchdog slammed the Education Bureau for allowing 29 school properties to lie idle in land-strapped Hong Kong.
Of the 29 schools, four had since been returned to the government, Secretary for Education Eddie Ng Hak-kim said. Sites in the government's land bank can be reallocated for other uses.
Another seven schools were still "functioning", Ng said without elaboration, while 14 had been set aside for other educational uses.
"The vacant schools in question are the last four," he said. "These four stand on private land and so involve land lease issues. We will speed up our work with the Lands Department to reclaim the properties."
The damning audit report, released last week, pointed out that 105 of 234 disused school sites were being wasted, including the 29 lots held by the bureau.
Eight of those had not been earmarked for any use, although three had remained empty since 2005 or before, according to the Audit Commission's report.
When asked if it would be hard to reclaim the sites, especially if the educational groups refused to return the land to the government, Ng said: "We do hope to deal with this quickly.
"In my understanding, the Legislative Council's Public Accounts Committee will be holding a hearing on this. There will be more information available then."
Apart from the 234 sites, the commission found another 14 schools that were not even registered in the bureau's system despite being unoccupied.
Its report also noted a large number of schools had received on average HK$19 million each for improvement works, but had vacated their premises less than five years after renovation as pupil numbers declined.
The watchdog went on to urge the bureau to revisit its tracking and reviewing mechanism for vacated schools.
"We have been reviewing the mechanism and we agree that in terms of the vacated school list and the number of reviews, we will make improvements," Ng said.
http://m.scmp.com/news/hong-kong/education-community/article/1881627/vacated-schools-cant-be-used-they-are-private
