The Housing Authority's Subsidised Housing Committee will discuss the tightening of the eligibility criteria for Green Form applicants at its meeting today. The criteria will be aligned with those for White Form applicants, i.e. they are not allowed to own property in Hong Kong for 24 months before buying a HOS flat.

According to sources, the Housing Authority (HA) discussed tightening the eligibility criteria for Green Form applicants to purchase HOS flats last month, and most of the HA members considered it unfair to allow public housing tenants to purchase government subsidised HOS flats even if they own residential properties in Hong Kong. Today's meeting of the Subsidised Housing Committee will discuss whether the eligibility criteria should be brought in line with those for White Form applicants, so that existing public housing tenants (Green Form applicants) are not allowed to own residential properties in Hong Kong from two years before they submit their HOS applications.

Green Form applicants and family members listed on the application form are not allowed to own or co-own any residential property in Hong Kong. Members are also not allowed to hold more than half of the shares of any company which owns residential property in Hong Kong, either directly or through a subsidiary company, and to be beneficiaries of any estate of a deceased person, which includes residential property or land in Hong Kong.

The Housing Authority also proposes that holders of Temporary Certificate of Occupation for a fixed term (i.e. well-off tenants in public housing) should no longer be eligible for Green Form application for HOS flats. According to the Housing Authority, Temporary Occupation Permit holders are in fact no longer public housing tenants and have requested to move out of their public housing units, so they should no longer be eligible for Green Form. As for the public's concern over whether PRH tenants who own properties in the Mainland or overseas should still be eligible for PRH and Green Form HOS, when the issue was discussed in the Legislative Council earlier, the Housing Bureau responded that according to the law, PRH tenants are required to declare their overseas properties and count them towards the asset limit, and it is a criminal offence to conceal the declaration, but admitted that it is difficult to follow up as it has no investigation power outside Hong Kong.

In an interview with Hong Kong Wen Wei Po, Mr Chiu said that the Government's move to tighten the eligibility criteria for Green Form applicants was an appropriate response to the community's concern, so that more needy people could have more opportunities to move into flats early. "The Green Form policy helps to vacate the very urgent public housing resources, so that well-off tenants who can afford to buy their own homes in public housing need to make good use of the resources and avoid the abuse of government housing resources. However, he stressed that the number of PRH tenants who own $10 million luxury flats or who can afford to buy their own homes is "only a minority of cases and certainly not the mainstream, which will not help much in freeing up PRH resources. He suggested that the Government should increase the quota for the sale of HOS flats to PRH tenants, and "consider giving more quotas to Green Form applicants, so that more PRH tenants can buy their own homes, which will help to speed up the vacating of PRH flats and enable more needy families to be allocated flats as soon as possible.