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SCMP Reporter

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

Kwan To Tim-kan, 53, locked herself inside a 180sq ft Tsz Wan Shan flat   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.

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

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.

Mrs Kwan said her husband had been living in the flat and they were  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.

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  November 21, 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.

A three-year legal battle between the Housing Authority and a retired dim sum worker ended  with all but one of the Court of Final Appeal judges hearing the case agreeing that the government had not charged public housing tenants too much rent.

In  last week's judgment, Chief Justice Andrew Li Kwok-nang ruled that amendments to the Housing Ordinance, effective since March 1998, protected tenants against 'too frequent and too substantial' rent increases, but dismissed the plaintiff's claim that keeping rents unchanged in times of deflation, as in 2001 and 2002, amounted to an increase in rents.

The judge said the authority's decisions to freeze rent both in 2001 and 2002 were not a breach of its statutory obligations. He said the ordinance only required the tenants' rent-to-median-income ratio to be capped at 10 per cent when there was any 'determination of variation of rents'.

Mr Justice Li said there was no doubt that each of the authority's decisions was a 'determination'. But he said they were 'plainly not a determination of variation of rent', as claimed by Johannes Chan Man-mun SC and Philip Dykes SC for 77-year-old appellant Ho Choi-wan.

Regarding the ratio, Mr Justice Li said the 10 per cent level did not purport to be a statutory definition of affordable housing as the appellant argued.

The amended ordinance also states that any rent adjustment can only take effect at least three years after the last change.

His judgment was supported by three other judges in the court. Only Mr Justice Kemal Bokhary dissented, stating in his judgment that the ordinance did not limit the frequency of rent reduction.

'The authority is duty bound in law to reduce rent to the extent necessary for bringing the median-rent- to-income ratio down to a level that does not exceed the 10 per cent cap,' Mr Justice Bokhary said.

'The authority was ... not brought into being for the purpose of balancing its books. It was brought into being for the purpose of providing affordable housing to households that cannot afford private sector housing.'

These are edited versions of articles by Zhuang Pinghui and Polly Hui that appeared in the South China Morning Post on November 22, 2005



Inside public housing