Streamline procedures to speed up land development: DAB

Duplicating procedures in land development should be streamlined while some of the process should start simultaneously to cut short the process time by half, lawmaker Edward Lau Kwok-fan says.

In a press briefing on Sunday, Lau from the Democratic Alliance for the Betterment and Progress of Hong Kong said amending the law to cut “red tapes” as current land development procedures are too complicated.

“Repeated public consultations and studies, combined with lack of coordination within government departments and lengthy planning procedures, it often takes over 10 years to make a land plot available for development,” Lau said.

He therefore proposed the government combine multiple consultations into two to expedite the land development process.

The government has done six to seven public consultations in developing the Hung Shui Kiu Ha Tsuen New Development Area, but he said two public consultations will be sufficient while developing the Northern Metropolis in the future.

“When we are developing these mega development plans, we can actually just do two rounds of public consultations,” Lau said.

“The government can first take out a development plan draft to build housing at Ma Tso Lung [in Sheung Shui], and then consult the public, and then make amendments to the statutory plans, and conduct public consultation again,” he added.

Another proposal is to unify the legal procedures to rezone both public and private land plots, meaning that two similar procedures can be combined into one while developing private land plots, according to Lau.

Currently, an application to rezone private land plots will have to go through “plan-making” and “planning approval” as two separate procedures, Lau proposed to have the government go over the application instead of the Town Planning Board, and allow the applicant to start drafting the statutory plan immediately afterwards.

At the same time, the government can also start other statutory procedures at the same time, including the environmental impact assessment and the gazette of road works, he added.

That would mean the land plot can be reclaimed once the statutory plan is approved by the Town Planning Board, which will save three to five years’ time when these procedures currently take around 8 to 10 years to complete, according to Lau.

He also suggested improving the compensation mechanism to reduce conflicts and step up flexibility in planning land usage, including implementing a “white zone” land use -- allowing the market instead of the government to decide the usage of the land plot.

“If my proposals are accepted, the development of the Northern Metropolis could be done in as soon as 10 years instead of the 20 years estimated by the government,” Lau said.