IN LAST year's annual Budget debate, there was cross-party consensus that there should be some form of assistance to help the sandwich class meet their housing needs.
The background was that soaring housing prices were making home ownership a reality only for the very top of the income hierarchy. The Government seemed to recognise this problem and responded by setting up an interdepartmental working group chaired by the Secretary for Planning, Environment and Lands, Mr Tony Eason.
The Governor, in his maiden Policy Speech in October, announced a scheme to help around 13,000 sandwich class families by setting aside land in the annual land disposal programme for sandwich class housing.
Although there was a delay in the Sino-British Land Commission meeting due to the current political row, a meeting to agree the 1993-94 land disposal programme was finally held and 4.8 hectares of land was set aside for sandwich class housing to be builtby the Housing Society. Last week, the Government released a proposal outlining interim options it is considering ''to meet the needs of the sandwich class for home purchase assistance in the short term''.
It was interesting, though, that the $2 billion for this purpose had already been earmarked in the Financial Secretary's Budget speech in March without any concrete plan at all at that time.
While we agree with the Government's premise that the solution to the sandwich class housing problem ''is to extend the public housing programme'' - and we therefore support earmarking land for this purpose in the annual land disposal programme - we are gravely concerned that the proposed interim measures are, in fact, a contradiction to this premise and they run the risk of fuelling the housing market, to the detriment of all the sandwich class.