A Hong Kong NGO has found that more than half of sites approved for use as temporary animal shelters may not be operational, raising concerns that the application process is being abused to carve out land for industrial and logistical purposes.
Examination of satellite images and site visits by the Liber Research Community suggested that 31 of 60 successful applications over the past five years involved shelters that only existed on paper.
The NGO, which focuses on land and development research, said it had found no trace of the flagged shelters online or any sign site operators had bought food needed to care for animals.
The group added that it feared the application process was potentially being abused to carve out plots of land for use as brownfield sites and warehouses.
“We discovered that about 80 per cent of the 60 successful applications were in agricultural areas, and 31 of the sites were suspected to be non-operational,” Brian Wong Shiu-hung, a researcher with the NGO, said on Monday.
He noted that one of the suspicious sites, in Sha Tau Kok, was believed to have been used for a warehouse after an application for an animal shelter was approved.
The NGO said the operator later applied to use the site as a logistics centre.
“This made us suspicious that some applicants may have had no intention of running animal shelters and were using this as an opportunity to convert farmland into brownfield sites,” Wong said.
He added some people could be filing animal shelter applications because it was easier to later lodge a fresh application that could involve a change of use after the first one expired.
The NGO studied temporary animal shelter applications from February 2019 to January this year. It found 80 per cent involved sites in Kam Tin, an area commonly used for the city’s brownfield operations.
But the Planning Department brushed aside concerns and said the Town Planning Board would have considered various factors, including the environmental and traffic impact, before applications were approved.
The department said it would investigate cases flagged by the NGO, but stressed that the regulations allowed for different planning applications that involved the same site to be submitted.
Lawmaker Andrew Lam Siu-lo said the problem of illegal land use in the New Territories was apparent, and the main concern was how effective the government’s supervision efforts were.
