Hong Kong's water scandal offers lessons on the proper roles of public and private sectors
Philip Bowring says both the lead contamination in Hong Kong's water and the BBC's declining standards underline the challenge of providing quality public goods
Holidaying in France, I had been musing over the fact that restaurant patrons now routinely ordered tap water rather than the bottled variety, which was once as ubiquitous as a of wine. Was this a mark of economic austerity? Or had the French finally come to realise that free was just as good as Evian, Perrier, San Pellegrino, etc?
Perhaps Hong Kong people could save some money by following suit and filling their ubiquitous personal water bottles from the tap rather than fall for the Watson's distilled variety, Coca-Cola's Bonaqua or the host of more or less expensive commercial products purporting, without much evidence, to be healthier than the free stuff.
So it was quite a shock to land back in Hong Kong in the midst of a scare over lead levels in tap water in certain public housing estates. A promotional coup for the bottled water sellers, this raised the question of why the government's Water Supplies Department, which rightly devoted time and effort to ensuring that it delivered water with minimal levels of bacteria, lead and heavy metals to estates, did not apparently require management companies to ensure that it was not contaminated in the final metres of piping to the household taps.
BBC World Service TV is an embarrassment, no better than CNN and inferior to Al-Jazeera and even Channel News Asia
Now there has been a flurry of activity to check public housing and Home Ownership Scheme estates. But what about the 50 per cent of housing controlled by management companies, which are mostly closely linked to the original estate developers? One is reminded that the biggest cluster of infections from the severe acute respiratory syndrome outbreak was traced to leaking waste pipes at the Amoy Gardens estate in Kowloon, developed and managed by the Hang Lung group.
So could Hong Kong's devotion to expensive bottled water be a correct response to concerns that whatever the standard of water produced by the Water Supplies Department, managements of estates could not be trusted to ensure that their pipes were delivering pristine, lead-free water?
If that is the case, it is another example of how private-sector developers are allowed to get away with potentially endangering public health and negating the efforts of the government, using taxpayers' money, to provide drinkable water.
Unless the public can become more confident that the water from their household taps is drinkable, they will continue to spend money on commercial substitutes, often from plastic bottles that themselves may deliver unwholesome chemicals to the user.
