Buildings Department all bark and no bite in enforcing unauthorized building removal orders

Hong Kong’s government watchdog said on Thursday that the Buildings Department has not proactively follow-up on cases regarding unauthorized building works in New Territories Exempted Houses, with over one-third of the removal orders issued ignored.  

The Office of The Ombudsman said, as of the end of 2021, among the 5,384 removal orders issued by the department, 2,016 remained outstanding while the deadline for removal had passed.  

The office noted that in some of the cases studied, the department’s issuance of removal orders was followed by years of inaction.  

“The Buildings Department’s failure to take timely action after issuing a removal order would likely convey a wrong message to the owner concerned that there would be no legal consequences for non-compliance. The owner might even have a false expectation that the Buildings Department had accepted the existence of the unauthorized building works,” it said.  

The office’s investigation also found that the average fine for each conviction against unauthorized building works was about HK$9,500 only in the past decade, which is insufficient to deter non-compliance.   

Meanwhile, the Ombudsman found that the department has yet to use the information collected from its enforcement actions to compile statistics on unauthorized building works, making it difficult for the department to make a systematic assessment of the effectiveness of the enhanced strategy and the changes after its implementation.  

The slow progress of large-scale operations in curbing unauthorized building works and the backlog of cases reflect that the department may not have the capacity to manage all necessary enforcement actions, it added.  

It recommended the department consolidate its experience in implementing the enhanced strategy in the past decade, holistically review the policy and resource utilization and explore how the limited resources can be used pragmatically to target the most serious types of unauthorized building works and repeated offenders for the time being.