Learn from Hong Kong’s past and let the private sector take the risk for Lantau Tomorrow project

Name: Why Carrie Lam’s Lantau land reclamation plan is so controversial
Uploaded: 2020-12-03T07:15:10.000Z
Duration: 2 min 43 s
Description: Why Carrie Lam’s Lantau land reclamation plan is so controversial

Lantau Tomorrow has the hallmarks of a project governments want to avoid, with multi-decade risks, leaving the poor taxpayer to clean up the mess

Hong Kong has built big infrastructure projects through the ‘build, operate, transfer’ approach and can do so again without risking the city’s financial health

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Motorists head through the reopened Cross-Harbour Tunnel in Hong Kong on November 27, 2019. The government has joined private-sector firms and financiers on past infrastructure projects, including cross-harbour tunnels, and could do so again on the Lantau Tomorrow project. Photo: AFP

Richard Harris

Published: 3:15pm, 3 Dec 2020Updated: 10:29pm, 3 Dec 2020

If you were sitting in one of the increasing number of traffic jams in Hong Kong, listening to Chief Executive Carrie Lam Cheng Yuet-ngor’s 2020 policy address, you might have been forgiven for wondering how it differed from that of 2019, except that it was six weeks late.

The newly confident chief executive followed her call for perseverance by persisting with a much-criticised policy likely to change Hong Kong’s wealth for the worse.

Using the three disjointed words “Lantau Tomorrow Vision”, she renewed her proposal to throw HK$624 billion (US$80.5 billion) into the sea. That’s the reclamation of 1,700 hectares (4,200 acres) of environment-destroying, money-eating, flat housing platform but with no houses.

Following the address, as many as 20 pro-establishment legislators raised doubts about the plan. The recent cost overruns on every recent major infrastructure project is a salutary indication of where this project is going to go.

The West Kowloon Cultural District, originally projected at HK$22 billion, is now expected to touch HK$70 billion, so the final bill for Lantau Tomorrow could easily be HK$1 trillion – more than our current fiscal reserves. That’s slim pickings when the Hong Kong Institute of Surveyors’ expected value of land sales on Lantau is only HK$1.14 trillion.

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Why Carrie Lam’s Lantau land reclamation plan is so controversial

The 2018 Task Force on Land Supply identified 1,300 hectares of brownfield sites in the New Territories. Why not start building on them before developing new ones?