Executive councillor Anthony Cheung Bing-leung, who is widely tipped to be the next housing minister, said publicly for the first time that the mechanism determining public rent should be reviewed.
The Housing Authority member and scholar also said the recent resumption of the Home Ownership Scheme and an increase in the number of public rental flats should be the leading measures used to balance the lack of affordable homes in the private market.
Cheung's comments, at an authority meeting yesterday, came two weeks after a decision to give public housing tenants a one-month waiver to ease the pain of a 10 per cent rent rise, the maximum allowed. This is on top of the two-month waiver granted in the budget earlier this year.
The decision two weeks ago attracted criticism that the mechanism was 'unofficially dead'.
At that time, Cheung, the chairman of the authority's subsidised housing committee, disagreed, saying it would take time to change the mechanism.
But at yesterday's meeting, he said: 'The description [that the mechanism was not working any more] has oversimplified the fact, but it does reflect the problems we are facing when the mechanism is put into practice. Perhaps there's really a need to review the mechanism.'