Budget Speech

Reserving Sites for Our Industries

63.      We are inviting expressions of interest to develop private hospitals on four reserved sites as announced in the Policy Address. The invitation will close at end-March this year. We will formulate the land disposal arrangements in light of the response and views from the market.

64.      Regarding education services, apart from the two urban sites and three sites in the New Territories reserved earlier, we will reserve a further site at the former Queen Hill's Camp in the New Territories to establish a self-financing tertiary institution. We estimate that the site will provide a gross floor area of more than 100 000 square metres and is suitable for the development of a self-financing tertiary institution with boarding facilities. The institution is expected to provide some 8 000 self-financing degree places. We expect to launch an Expression of Interest exercise by the end of this year to invite development proposals from institutions and education bodies. Moreover, the Finance Committee of this Council approved early this month an additional $2 billion loan commitment for post-secondary education providers to develop or refurbish campus premises. All these measures will help increase the number of places for tertiary education and facilitate the diversified development of the higher education sector, thereby strengthening Hong Kong's status as a regional education hub.

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