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SCMP Reporter

Couple ordered to move because authority believed they were not living in premises

A public housing tenant who refused to leave her flat after losing appeals against eviction was forcibly removed yesterday.

Kwan To Tim-kan, 53, locked herself inside a 180sqft Tsz Wan Shan flat yesterday morning when a dozen Housing Authority officers and police arrived to take it back.

Screaming for help, she held the door shut with her body and gripped the handle for more than 10 minutes even after officers broke the  lock with a hammer.

Mrs Kwan, who was ordered to leave the flat in Tsz Ching Estate for abusing the public housing system, collapsed in tears when officers entered the flat. 'We didn't do anything wrong. Why force us out?' she cried.

She was then taken to Queen Elizabeth Hospital after she claimed  she was feeling unwell. Meanwhile, her husband, Kwan Ching, 64, was holding a one-man protest in front of the authority's headquarters in Ho Man Tin.

The couple were ordered to move because the authority believed they were not living in the flat - which the couple denied.

They were  ordered to move out in May  last year after it was found they had used neither electricity nor water from 2001 to 2004. Authority officers had been able to meet Mr Kwan only once by appointment in 15 visits to the flat.

They removed all the couple's belongings  yesterday, before changing the lock and sealing the flat.

Mrs Kwan said her husband had been living in the flat and they were extremely frugal about electricity consumption.

She said she took a babysitting job with her husband's son from 2002 to 2004 and stayed with the employer, while her husband took showers and meals at his workplace. They did not use any electric appliances and relied on the corridor illumination for light.

Mrs Kwan said: 'My husband works  in a Mongkok hardware store and the place is very dirty, so he takes showers and eats there before going home to sleep. He doesn't turn on the lights at home as there is corridor light when the door is open. We have a refrigerator but we never use it.'

A  next-door neighbour said he saw Mr Kwan almost every day.

'He would leave home very early, around 6.10am,  and return  very late. I saw him almost every day and we greeted each other. The authority is being  unreasonable to force them out as they  neither dump rubbish nor bother others.'

The couple's appeal to an independent panel in April was rejected. Their applications for a judicial review were also turned down in June and October.

The authority issued a notice last month ordering them to evacuate by yesterday, and arranged for them to stay at a transit centre in Tuen Mun. But Mrs Kwan said they could not live there as it was 'worse than a prison cell' and far from her husband's workplace. She described the transit centre as 'horrible and not for human  habitation', adding that people had to live in bunks and had only a curtain to separate them from other families.

An authority spokeswoman said the investigation had suggested the couple had not lived in the flat for about three years. She said the couple had gone through all the legal procedures and the only options available were to live in the transit centre or apply for other low-income housing.

Legislator Albert Ho Chun-yan  said yesterday evening that he had helped Mr Kwan apply for low- income housing.



Tearful public housing tenant forced from flat